Robert Stam
Tuesdays / 12:30-4:30pm / Room 670
4 points
CINE-GT 2056 / Class # 23546
A very high proportion of films made around the world have been adaptations of pre-existing works, whether plays, novels, comic books, biographies, internet games, or some other source “text.” To take only a few examples, one need only think of films like Fight Club, Twelve Years a Slave, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Spider-Man, Lord of the Rings, My Cousin Rachel, and Crazy Rich Asians. This course is designed primarily for graduate students in Cinema Studies but also open to graduate students in Comparative Literature, French, Spanish-Portuguese, and English.
The course has three levels. On a first, historical/literary level, the core of the course will examine a chronologically-arranged sequence of classic novels (and their cinematic and mediatic adaptations) among them novels from England (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Austen’s Pride and Prejudice); Russia (Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground), Nabokov’s Lolita, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; France (Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; Henri-Pierre Roche’s Jules and Jim; Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour); Italy (Moravia’s Il Disprezzo) and Brazil (Mario de Andrade’s Macunaima; Machado de Assis’ Posthumous Memories of Bras Cubas, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star). On a second, analytic novel, we will perform exercises in comparative stylistics by doing close readings of brief passages from the novels and examining the film sequences based on them. On a third, theoretical level, the course will use a wide variety of shot clips to treat adaptation in the broader sense as an essential part of the creative process in the form of what is used to be called “influence” but is now often referred to as “dialogism,” “intertextuality,” “transtextuality,” “intermediality,” “remediation,” “remix,” “media hybridity” and so forth. All of these theories treat the complex relations between single texts -- whether a play, a novel, a film, a TV show, a music video, or any other kind of text -- and all the other texts, genres, media, and discourses with which those texts come into dialogue. Although transtextuality theory will in this case be deployed to inform our readings of novels and films, it is ultimately relevant to all the arts, since the arts generally rethink, adapt, change, transform, and remediate pre-existing texts, arts, and genres. The course will touch on a number of broader issues: the ingrained prejudices against film adaptation as a “parasitic” form; the idea of the “proto-cinematic novel;” the problematics of the concept of “fidelity;” the amplification of intertexts in a multi-track medium; adaptation as social barometer; transcultural adaptation, and the impact of the “digital turn” on the practice and theory of adaptation.
The reading for the course consists primarily in the reading of the literary source-texts – whether of entire novels or of selected passages -- combined with some theoretical texts by Linda Hutcheon, Eli Horwatt, Katherine Kroos, and others, treating adaptation and remix generally. In the classes, we will do close analyses, first of the novels as literature, and then of the film adaptations as films, demonstrating the ways that a transtextual approach can illuminate both literature and film and the practice of adaptation across media. The course will be especially concerned with revisionist and transmedial adaptations that update, challenge, and otherwise alter their source texts, in sum the endless “remediations” (Bolter and Grusin) of novels, as the source texts mutate into other forms and genres such as cartoons, popular songs, music videos, parodies and so forth. Classic novels such as Robinson Crusoe, for example, have spawned scores of adaptations moving from the “faithful” to the irreverent (the Bunuel version) to the subversively anti-colonial (Man Friday) with myriad covert reiterations such as Castaway and the Reality Show Survivor. The course, in sum, will explore artistic and interpretative remix practices that are both very ancient and extremely contemporary.