Department of English

This course considers how stories are told differently through different media and to different audiences, and how such differences inform the many decisions involved in the translation of works across media and across time. To do so, we will consider key literary works (novels, stories, plays) as well as their (multiple) re-workings for film and television. Possible groupings may include Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and its 1940, 1995 and 2005 films and mini-series, as well as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist along with David Lean’s 1948 film, Roman Polanski’s 2005 version, possibly with the 1968 film of the Broadway musical Oliver!, and the 2005 South African representative to the Cannes Film Festival, Boy Called Twist. Other works whose life in literature and film we may explore include: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (including “A Scandal in Bohemia”), Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, E.M. Forster’s Maurice, and Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight.

This course has no prerequisites and is first-year friendly. Required: 2 papers, 1 exam, 1 final paper/project, and once or twice-weekly, low stakes online discussion posts. Conspicuous in-class engagement is also required.