Department of English

This is an intermediate-level course centered on the study of novels and their film adaptations. We will consider a set of so-called “literary fictions” first, including Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. We will then to turn genre types, all with their own specific narrative codes and conventions. The genres will include science fiction, the western, historical romance, the spy novel, the detective novel, and memoir and the second half of the course will feature paired film-text adaptations of the work of Ted Chiang, Annie Proulx, Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler, John Le Carré, and Marjane Satrapi. In both phases of the class, we will zero in on the distinct and specific storytelling techniques used by novels and feature-length films at various stages in their intertwined histories. Graded requirements will include two critical papers on film adaptation, several short writing assignments, and a take-home final exam