Adaptation: From Text to Screen

Cinematic adaptations of novels, short stories and plays have dominated the box office and film industry awards for some decades, often provoking fierce debate about their fidelity, or otherwise, to the original; discussions about how the text has been transformed, cut and downright ruined, or, conversely, how the film has 'rescued' the novel, making it seem interesting and worth reading in a new context. The proliferation of YouTube, Facebook and multimodal adaptations in recent years has only reignited and reformulated these discussions. This course critically examines a series of texts together with their adaptations on to different kinds of screens, in order to understand the differences between novels, short stories, plays, film and other visual media as modes of storytelling; investigate the way the written text and its adaptation participate in debates unique to their own historical contexts; and analyse the anxieties about literary and cultural value exposed by adaptations. We will ask: how do screen adaptations generate new meanings from literary texts today? Should an adaptation seek only to imitate the text or can it also transform, reconceptualise and critique it? What role do the market and the audience play in generating new meanings from texts? And can the relationship between text and adaptation be understood as mutually dependent?