Course Description
Introduces students to the principles and history of adapting literary texts -- whether dramatizing prose fiction or verse drama for the cinema or for television serialization, adapting literature and film for digital or mobile media, reimagining texts, or adapting theories and methods from narratology to create videogames.
Athena Title
Lit and Adaptation
Prerequisite
ENGL 1102 or ENGL 1102E or ENGL 1102S or ENGL 1050H or ENGL 1060H
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
*Students will practice reading, watching, and discussing print, visual, and digital media as adaptations. *Students will practice writing about adaptations, both derivative and transformative. *Students will practice using narratology to identify the transmedia elements of a story, fictional setting, or character (a set of actions, a set of tropes, a set of traits) and to "spot" adaptations in the wild. *Students will practice discussing pertinent issues of intellectual property pertaining to the adaptation and dissemination of literary works and the often contentious difference between "derivative" and "transformative" use.
Topical Outline
While individual texts will vary from year to year and instructor to instructor, the course will cover the same broad strokes: 1) How do we identify something as an adaptation? 2) Why do we adapt prior literary properties to different media, and to what effect? 3) What makes an adaptation artistically or commercially successful? 4) What are some of the implications of current laws about intellectual property and "derivative" or "transformative" use for fans, internet users, teachers, and students within contemporary "sharing" or "remix" creative cultures? We will read from classic structuralist texts undergirding narratology, such as Propp's _Morphology of the Folktale_ and Joseph Campbell's _Hero With a Thousand Faces_ as well as from Linda Hutcheon's germinal _Adaptation_, and identify the transmedia characteristics of classic and contemporary texts before we follow them through their multiple adaptations. Classic texts we might consider through multiple adapted forms include Sophocles' _Antigone_; Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_; Nella Larsen's _Passing_; Gabriel Garcia Marquez's _Love in the Time of Cholera_; Margaret Mitchell's _Gone With the Wind_, and many others; contemporary adaptations of these texts include, for example, Theatre of War's "The Nurse Antigone," the 2019 Canadian film _Antigone_ that modernizes and sets the play amid Algerian refugees in Montréal; two films of _West Side Story_ and a tweeted performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company; two popular mid-twentieth-century films, both called _Imitation of Life_, and a 2021 streaming film; pandemic-renewed responses to _Love in the Time of Cholera_; Alice Randall's _The Wind Done Gone_ and the documents surrounding the legal case unsuccessfully brought by the Mitchell estate.