01 MW5 CAC 31943 SADOFF MU-111
T6, 7 FILM SCREENING SC-205
02 T2 CAC 35472 YEOH SC-202
F2 SC-101
01-Our Monsters, Ourselves: Vampires in Literature and on Film
This is a course on film adaptation of literary texts. I have two goals for the course. First, I hope to expose you to a wide range of films, some of which you may have seen, many not. We will view films across the entire range of film genres: silent film, classic and mainstream Hollywood cinema, and foreign art film and independent cinema. We will read the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels from which these films were adapted or on which they're based to discover how the films appropriate and remediate the narratives (that is, rewrite them in a new medium). We will also watch films that remake, spoof, or parody earlier horror films. The nature of film and literary intertextuality, then, is one of our two foci.
Second, our thematic focus will be on vampires, parasites, and other modern vermin. I have called the course "Our Vampires, Ourselves" because I believe that this genre—horror film—does cultural work for the 20th- and 21st-century moviegoer and for the culture at large. Questions we will ask include: how are 19th-century vampires "modern"? Why have their tales lived on to "haunt" us? What kinds of social problems do they address for 20th- and 21st-century spectators? Why is movie-generated fear so much fun? How are vampires like "ourselves"? This course, then, aims to increase your ability to read the film frame and to interpret cultural ideologies as they are represented in film, as well as to enhance your repertoire of literary and film-viewing knowledge.
Our literary texts will be Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Bram Stoker, Dracula; and Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley. We will also read film theory and criticism: essays about the horror genre, the cultural uses of literary film adaptation, and the social function of cinema exhibition.
Attendance: Regular attendance and participation required, including at film screenings. More than three absences will lower your grade.
Means of evaluation: class participation, response papers, in-class and out-of-class writing assignments, and two 6-7 page papers.
02-RE-Reading the Popular Classics from Frankenstein to Peter Pan
As various theoretical currents within English studies have created a general trend to make the discipline “less elitist,” popular fiction has received increased scholarly attention in the past three decades. How do we read such literature? Do such texts merit the same kind of close study and methods of analysis that experts have developed for texts whose critical reputation is better established, or do they require different strategies of reading? Is mass literature worthy of critical attention solely – or primarily – for its ideological function? Does the enduring appeal of certain popular texts register the persistence of certain ideologies, or does this readability in fact argue in support of their “classic” status? Re-reading the Popular Classics proposes to address these questions in the context of several works of nineteenth-century British fiction which straddle the boundaries between popular and “high” literature – texts which have been endorsed by professional critics at one time or other, yet at the same time have acquired a degree of cultural currency and influence which are still felt in the present. “Popular classics” like Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Peter Pan have not only shaped popular understandings of “literature” in significant ways, but have left a rich legacy of characters and ideas which continue to be appropriated in contemporary culture. The continuing appeal (and usability) of these fictions makes an understanding of their original forms and contexts an acquisition in itself; in addition, by inviting students to consider the “afterlives” of these texts in a global context, the course provides them an opportunity to explore the idea of literature as social practice – to study how people use (and transform) widely-received cultural narratives in the broader context of their lives.
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