ENG 5138 Spring 2019 Parker-Flynn

Since its birth, the cinema and its filmmakers have constantly drawn from literary sources to create narratives in the new medium.

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, reading the source literature and concurrently examining the film text. Some will be more classically defined, such as Robert Siodmak’s adaptation of Hemingway’s The Killers (1964), and others will force us to address adaptation as a concept perhaps equal to influence, as when we study the connectivity between Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Thomas de Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Subsequently, we may also be exploring the reverse; how some literature—including works by Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe—was influenced by film, or at least by “seeing cinematically,” before the cinema even fully evolved. Selected film and adaptation theory will be read, including writings by André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Raymond Bellour, Sergei Eisenstein, Kamilla Elliott, Thomas Leitch, Linda Hutcheon, and Robert Stam.

Texts for study may include works by the following authors: James Baldwin, Lewis Carroll, Phillip K. Dick, Ernest Hemingway, Daphne du Maurier, Haruki Murakami, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas de Quincey, Oscar Wilde, etc.

Films for study may include: Adaptation, Alice in Wonderland, The Birds, Blade Runner/Blade Runner: 2049, Burning, Don’t Look Now, Eyes Wide Shut, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Killers, Rope, Salomé, Suspiria, etc.