COR-400T
Adaptation
Julio Cortazar once said about Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up, an adaptation of Cortazar's short story "Blow-Up," "I left Antonioni absolutely free to depart from my story and follow his own ghosts; and in search for them, he met with some of mine." In the spirit of Cortazar's remarks, this course will explore film, literary, and other texts that complicate simple evaluations of film adaptations as "true" to their literary predecessors. The course thus proposes to articulate alternative models for discussing adaptations that expand our ideas about the relationship between visual and written texts. The course will focus on adaptations that transpose the plot, theme tone, and/or ideology of the source text in ways that resonate with but don't simply or directly represent sources. While some of the works we address attempt mainly to translate literary texts into visual terms, others we will study profoundly echo their predecessors while invoking a diverse set of contexts, techniques, and themes. The course analyzes films, literature, and other forms of art (such as theater and music) to ask questions about the meaning of adaptation, as a cultural force and as a way of understanding potential transformations. These transformations assert a likeness among texts, selves, and culture itself, suggesting that the way we reimagine stories is an act of creativity that speaks to the potential for human and social transformations. Senior standing required.