Literary Works and their Film Adaptations 3301-LB11B2005

This course picks up on an interest in the process of adaptation from text to screen which has increased in the past three decades or so, but much earlier emerged with the popularity of films based on works of fiction, particularly in the period of the rapid growth of Hollywood film industry.
The subject of film adaptation has attracted much critical attention. Some modernist critics argued against adaptation of fiction on the grounds that it threatened to devour its literary source, while more recently, the reader-oriented theorists contend that film adaptations constraint the viewer's imagination because they fill in too many gaps at narrative level. However, many contemporary film theorists dismiss this kind of hostile criticism because during the 1960s and 1970s film adaptations underwent enormous structural, stylistic, and technological changes. The distance between the adaptations made prior to 1960 and those made in recent decades is easily noticeable from any point of view.
The evolution of film adaptations and the evolution of the language of the cinema helped to reshape and change their status. Recording these changes, the French critic Andre Bazin claims that the contemporary filmmaker is, at least, the equal of the novelist. Bazin is one of those critics who emphasize that in its transition from page to screen, the novel calls for a high degree of creativity. He also criticizes those filmmakers who adapt first-rate novels treating them merely as the source material from which the characters and the plot can be extracted.
For many years the discourse on adaptation has centred on the issue of fidelity of the film version to its literary original. Modern film theorists point out that there are many kinds of relations which may exist between film and literature. They also question the primacy of fidelity as a critical criterion. It is the aim of this course to introduce the students to more productive ways of studying the process of transposition from novel to film. Contemporary theorists emphasize the usefulness of the notion of intertextuality in any discussion of the nature of adaptation. The most important issue is not whether the screen adaptation is faithul to the source work, but rather how one narrative is used at the service of another and to what extent a specific approach to that literary source serves to create a new work of art. To diminish the importance of fidelity, some critics have proposed to categorize adaptations. Thus Geoffrey Wagner divides film adaptation into three "modes', which he calls (1) transposition, (2), commentary, and (3) analogy. Another important work in the field of film adaptation is Brian McFarlane's book Novel to Film (1996) in which the author makes a critical distinction between what may be transferred from one medium to another (Transfer) and what necessarily requires Adaptation Proper, that is, those elements of the original text which involve intricate processes of adaptation because their effects are closely tied to the semiotic system in which they are manifested.
This course will encourage the students to test new methodologies for studying the process of transposition from novel to film.