ENG 3114 Parker Spring 2021

Since its birth, the cinema and its filmmakers have constantly drawn from literary sources to create narratives in the new medium. Though adaptation has been integral at the very core of film (studies), the topic has been debated for as long as the cinema has existed, debates that range widely: the valorization of literature over film as the “low art,” to film adaptation as the “democratization” of literature, to the concept of adaptation (or “change”) as central to the core of any representational art/text. When pairing literary and filmic texts, as we will in this course, perhaps the word “adaptation” itself needs to be adapted; for example, Dudley Andrew offered “borrowing, intersecting, and transforming” as options for analysis.

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. Films (and relevant source texts) for study may include: Adaptation, Alice in Wonderland, American Splendor, Blade Runner, The Big Lebowski, The Big Sleep, The Birds, Don’t Look Now, Gun Crazy, The Killers, Persepolis, Strangers on a Train.