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Kies de Nederlandse taal
Course module: UCHUMMAP22
UCHUMMAP22
Adaptation Studies: from text to screen
Course info
Course codeUCHUMMAP22
EC7.5
Course goals
After completing this course students are able to:
  • understand the wide-ranging cross-medial connections between literature and film, and other media forms
  • demonstrate familiarity with competing theories of adaptation
  • conduct a narrative and formal analysis of a film (scene) and identify motifs and themes
  • discern the cultural, political, and economic contexts and implications of specific adaptations
Content
In recent years studying adaptions has made a comeback in the academic world and ‘Adaptation Studies’ has emerged as a distinct field of research at the intersection of disciplines such as Comparative Literature, Film, Media and Performance Studies. An unsurprising tendency considering that the majority of films in cinema today are adaptations of texts, whether that ‘text’ is a literary novel, stage play, comic book/graphic novel or a video game. Similarly, transpositions also occur to screens other than the cinematic screen, as digital technologies have advanced accessibility to production tools, making user-generated remakes and remixes of existing films a pervasive phenomenon on our computer screens.
 
In this course students will compare primary texts and their adaptations and consider classic as well as contemporary theories of adaptation. These newer approaches have moved away from questions of fidelity. Instead they analyse how a story changes when being adapted into another medium or for another audience; they probe the artistic potential of adaptations, and foreground historical and cultural contexts or the commercial infrastructures in which an adaptation is produced.
Students will also learn how to conduct a formal film analysis and they will be in engaged in theoretical debates about medium specificity, transmediality and postcolonial adaptations.  
During the semester students will be required to produce three shorter written essays as well as a (scholarly) video essay (in other words, a video clip). They will present their research proposals in class and conclude the course with an extended research paper.

Format:
 
Teaching methods include:
  • (interactive) lectures
  • close reading of theoretical texts
  • plenary discussions
  • in-class film analysis
  • presentations
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Kies de Nederlandse taal