La asignatura se desarrollará en las siguientes Unidades de contenido:
UNIT 1
1. Introduction to Film Adaptation Studies: Literature and Film Intersections.
1.1. Films irrupting literature at the beginning of the 20th Century
1.2. Literary Film Adaptations
This Unit is an introduction of the rather productive - not always easy - relationship between literature and film. This Unit will examine, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the fruitful, active and symbiotic exchanges between written words and cinematic images. We shall explore some literary opinions on the new art and the innovations that cinema brought about into literature. In the process the Unit shall introduce us to terms such as adaptation, borrowing, versioning, negotiation, appropriation, transmediation, analogy, equivalence, resistance, pastiche, collision, to name but a few notions that are to be furthered along the different Units of the course.
UNIT 2
2. Transmutations of the Word: Noir Literature in English in the Movies
2.1 The Mystery of the Word in Images: The Relationship Between Noir Fiction and Film.
2.2. Comparative Study of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers in a Train (1950) and Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation
This Unit shall explore the concept of ‘Noir’ in literature and film. Among other things we shall compare and contrast the term in both artistic expressions to analyze the importance of the medium in the telling and reception of the story. For this purpose we shall overview the history of Noir and pinpoint the similarities and differences between film and literature. We shall concentrate in a particularly interesting case study for it will help us to text concepts encountered up to now with particular reference to two idiosyncratic and “original” perspectives of a story: Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock.
UNIT 3
3. The Unmesurable Continuity of the Intertext: Different Film Adaptations of the Classics
3.1. Jane Austen’s Fiction in Films
3.2. Comparative Study of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and several selections from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
This Unit shall enter one of the most fruitful and lively arenas of academic discussion regarding cinematic adaptations of classical literary works. Here we shall examine the question of faithfulness and deviation from the source and the taxonomies related to these two very broad concepts as they have been theorized by different authors. Then we shall put theory into practice by looking a different fil adaptations of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein in the hope of enhancing the theoretical discussion.
UNIT 4
4. Elegy to the Death of The Author
4.1 Comparative Study of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a Biography (1928) and Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992)
4.2 Film, Literature and ITT Intersections: The Golden Age of Adaptations
Taking Orlando as a case study, this last Unit will bring to the foreground the hybrid intertextual connection between literature and film questioning the very concept of orginal and copy and reaching out for new forms of understanding the symbiotic relationship that nowadays sustains the multiplicity of perspectives inscribed in the dyad film-literature. From a postmodern perspective we shall analyze in this Units concepts such as pastiche, intertextuality or re-functioning. To further this, we shall explore, albeit succinctly, other derivatives, such as adaptation in the era of the New Technologies opening up, in this manner, the genres of adaptation.
