Novel Adaptations: Text, Illustration, Film
Overview
- Credit value: 15 credits at Level 5
- Coordinator: Ann Lewis
- Assessment: a 2000-word essay written in English or French (60%) and an in-class test in English or French (40%)
Module description
In this module you will learn about theories of adaptation and intermediality - the processes by which literary texts are transposed into and combined with other media - with a focus on illustration and film. We will examine two highly celebrated works of French literature, each from a different period and each of which deploys highly complex and distinctive modes of narration (Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, and Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu).
You will explore the different formal means by which a given story can be narrated via different media, and how meaning is created differently through the use of various types of verbal and visual signs (in the context of intertextual and iconographical networks and traditions). The status of illustrations and adaptations in relation to the text 'of origin' will be evaluated, as well as the different interpretative problems and ambiguities to which each gives rise.
Recommended reading
Set texts
- Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses - any French edition as long as it is not abridged [or Penguin Classics / Oxford World Classics translation].
- Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu - any French edition as long as it is not abridged. English Translation: In Search of Lost Time trans. Montcrieff, Enright and Kilmartin (Vintage Classics, paperback).
indicative Secondary Reading List
General
- Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (CUP, 2003).
- Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (Routledge, 2006).
- Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (John Hopkins University Press, 2007).
- Robert Mayer, ed., Eighteenth-Century Fiction on the Screen (CUP, 2002).
- Peter Reynolds, ed., Novel Images: Literature in Performance (Routledge, 1993).
On Laclos
- Peter Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness (Princeton UP, 1969), Chapter 5 on LD.
- Simon Davies, Les Liaisons dangereuses (Grant & Cutler, 1987).
- Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text (Columbia UP, 1980), two brief chapters on LD.
- Michel Delon and Michèle Sajous D'Orbia, Laclos en images: Éditions illustrées des Liaisons dangereuses (Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003).
- Brigitte E. Humbert, De la lettre à l’écran: Les Liaisons dangereuses (Rodopi, 2000).
On Proust
- Martine Beugnet and Marion Schmid, Proust at the Movies (Ashgate, 2005).
- Malcolm Bowie, Proust among the stars (Harper Collins, 1998).
- James H. Reid, Proust, Beckett, and narration (CUP, 2003).
- Adam Watt, Marcel Proust in context (CUP, 2013).