EC US literature: Adaptations

Racial Issues in American Literature : from Text to Screen

In this course, we study the treatment of racial issues in American literature through the lens of their screen adaptations (film and television). Special emphasis is placed on the modifications introduced in the screen versions that may discredit or indeed justify the very process of adapting the source texts: the temptation to overfictionalize racial issues when adapting the literary work, and the addition of an intersectional perspective in the screen version. The range of works under study spans from plainly racist works (The Clansman) to abolitionist literature (Uncle Tom’s Cabin). The corpus also includes, among others, Huckleberry Finn, The Color Purple, and Beloved.

Narratives from Text to Screen: degrees of Fictionalization. (Two classes).

Back to the Roots of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Debunking Stereotypes through Adaptation?

Birth of a Nation Re-born: Dixon, Griffith, Parker.

Scripting Huckleberry Finn: The Redeeming Power of Adaptation.

Beloved on Screen: The Ghostly Presence of a Novel No One can Adapt?

Revisiting Gone with the Wind (Mitchell, Fleming).

Adaptation, Race, and the Trial Film Genre. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee/Robert Mulligan).

Adapting Womanism: The Color Purple (Walker/Spielberg).

The Making of an Oscar Winner: Is Green Book (Farrelly) an Adaptation?

“Best adaptation”? BlacKkKlansman (Stallworth, Lee).

Adaptation and the New Jim Crow: If Beale Street Could Talk (Baldwin, Jenkins).

Passing from Page to Screen: Imitation of Life (Hurst, Stahl, Sirk).

(Extra) – Adaptation and the Demand for Representation: Black Panther (from Comic Book to Film).

(Extra) – From Graphic Novel to TV Series: Racializing Watchmen.

Select bibliography:

Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. Second edition. The Critical Idiom series. Routledge, 2011.

Corrigan, Timothy. Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Routledge, 2012.

Cutchins, Dennis R., Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts. The Routledge Companion to Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2018.

Geraghty, Christine. Now A Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.

Grossman, Julie and R. Barton Palmer, eds. Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds. London: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2017.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006; Second edition (with Siobhan O’Flynn). New York: Routledge, 2013.

Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and its Discontents. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Leitch, Thomas. The History of American Literature on Film. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2019.

Murray, Simone. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. Routledge, 2013.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. Routledge, 2006.

Stam, Robert. Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Blackwell, 2005