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Adaptation

ENGL 392.402
instructor(s):

 

The continual exchanges between literature and film throughout the twentieth century—from the Silent Shakespeares of the 1900s to the 2012 Anna Karenina--have made it virtually impossible to study one without the other. Since 1895 the relationship between the two practices has evolved and changed dramatically, always as a measure of larger cultural, industrial, and aesthetic concerns. Well beyond questions of textual fidelity, today the debates about the interactions of film and literature have opened and enriched specific textual case studies of adaptation but also pointed to larger concerns and debates which resonate more broadly across both literary studies and film studies: for instance about the cultural and textual terms of authorship, about the economic and political pressures permeating any adaptation, about the literature’s appropriation of cinematic and other media structures.  Indeed, today adaptation studies now move well beyond just literature and film, involving video games, YouTube mash ups, and numerous other textual and cultural activities that invigorate and complicate the importance of theories, practices, and histories of adaptation into the 21st century.

fulfills requirements
Elective Seminar of the Standard Major