ENG5138 – Spring 2027 – Parker-Flynn

Since its conception, the cinema and its filmmakers have constantly drawn from literary sources to create narratives in the new medium. In this course, we will study classic and contemporary theories of film adaptation, borrowing as well as breaking from the concept of fidelity to create a space to explore how the cinema engages with literature, and how literary stories are deformed and reformed through the medium of film. We will examine a variety of text-to-film adaptations and explore their wider adaptation “networks,” as well as consider how some literature and culture were influenced by film, or adapted itself by “seeing cinematically,” before the cinema even fully evolved.

Subcategories for study may include: animation in/as adaptation, cinema and modernity, reel bodies, ecocriticism & biocinemimicry, and the proto-cinema of Thomas de Quincey.

Selected film/adaptation theory will be read, including writings by André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Raymond Bellour, Charles Darwin, Sergei Eisenstein, Kamilla Elliott, Lucy Fischer, Tom Gunning, Thomas Leitch, Linda Hutcheon, and Robert Stam.