This course introduces you to the intersections of literature- and film studies. We familiarize ourselves with the relations between these media from the late 19th century to the present: from the ‘cinematic’ novel before the film (Flaubert’s Madame Bovary) to literary modernism; from the literary, Dickensian techniques of the early film (D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein), to modernist experimentations in cinema (Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup). We will trace the structures of Hollywood cinema from ‘old’ literary formats such as the classic Western story to the later anti-Westerns, and look at formalistic devices from techniques of montage in experimental literature to the cut-and-paste culture of personal zines in the digital age. Central to this course are a number of theoretical concepts from literary- and film theory such as adaptation, performance and (film) narratology. The course is centered on influential cases of works that have been adapted from paper to screen, such as Julio Cortázar’s “Blowup” (“Las Babas del Diablo”, 1959), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and “Secretary” (1988) by Mary Gaitskill. You will also get the chance to improve your own skills at adaptation: one week will be devoted to creative writing, in an exercise of adapting a short story to a screenplay.