Adaptation of Narrative across Media
Professor David Richter

Shall we read the novel or wait for the movie to come out? We expect that popular novels will become films, that successful films will made into operas, and that comic book characters will show up in Broadway musicals. J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit, the prequel to Lord of the Rings, has been transformed into an animated film, into two live-action films to be released next year, a graphic novel (adapted by Dixon and Deming), and, like some other quest fantasies, into two role-playing video games. Jane Austen's most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, has been made into two films set in Regency England and transposed into other films set in today's London (Bridget Jones's Diary), and India (Bride and Prejudice) and Utah (A Latter-Day Comedy).

There is a tendency to treat adaptation as a one-dimensional process--to begin and end by asking what has gotten lost in translation--particularly when the "original" is a respected literary text and the adaptation is a movie which, most of the time, is just a movie. But adaptation involves creative interpretation, and two film adaptations of the same text can present very different interpretations, as do Laurence Olivier's and Kenneth Branagh's versions of Shakespeare's Henry V, which read into the same text opposing attitudes toward patriotism and war.

And "getting it right" can't be the whole story, in any case, since many canonical texts are adaptations of texts that might otherwise have been forgotten. To continue with Shakespeare, Othello was adapted from "Un capitano Moro," a short tale by Giovan Battista Giraldi aka Cinthio, and it's clear that there a great deal was gained in the translation. Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida was taken from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, behind which we can glimpse Boccaccio's Filostrato and, a long way back of that, Homer's Iliad. There we can see adaptive interpretations involved in an elaborate process of creative destruction, each new work a genuine rethinking and reframing of the earlier work, and scholars argue whether what emerged was successful or not. And sometimes the destruction is done with malice aforethought, as with Martin Rowson's "graphic novel" version of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, an oppositional adaptation, adaptation as critique, with Rowson using film noir imagery--drawn from the Howard Hawks film of The Big Sleep--to parody the iconic modernist poem.

This seminar will focus on the differences in the ways stories are told in prose, in film, in graphic designs, the storytelling practices and strategies and techniques that operate within specific media (and resist translation), the changes adaptation force not only in the manner of telling but in what can be told, and, inevitably, the social, cultural, and political motives that may underlie these changes. We will not be interested primarily in safe and faithful reproductions of originals, but in adaptations that either take artistic liberties or challenge the rules of their own medium by attempting a literal translation, as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew, or Eric Rohmer's Percival (from a medieval grail legend by Chretien de Troyes).

In addition to some of those named above, the seminar may include texts such as Akira Kurosawa's Ran (based on Shakespeare's King Lear), Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park (based Jane Austen's novel, letters and juvenilia), Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (based on Anthony Burgess's novel) and Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World (based on Daniel Clowes's graphic novel). Students will work on individually chosen projects.

For more information, please contact me at david.richter@qc.cuny.edu.

"The Observed Life: Gossip, Secrecy and the Making of Social Knowledge"

"Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality." —Oscar Wilde

The practice of gossip is as old as language itself, assuming a dominant role in our daily interactions and calling up powerful cultural embodiments from Virgil’s creaturely portrayal of the goddess Fama, covered with a multitude of eyes, ears, and tongues, to the disembodied voice-over and distilled malice of Kristen Bell’s Gossip Girl. As social media such as Twitter and Facebook hasten the flow of social information, raising unprecedented possibilities of intervention, access, and injury, now seems an opportune and urgent moment to reconsider the stories we tell, how they circulate, and what they reveal about what we know (or what we want to know/be known) about ourselves and others: our appetites, loyalties, preoccupations, and passions.

The word “gossip” has shifted dramatically from its Old English and Norse roots, when it designated a godparent (“god-sibbe”) of either sex who became a child’s spiritual sponsor at baptism. Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century dictionary offers two further definitions: “a tippling companion”; and “One who runs about like women at a lying-in” (that is, at the birth of a child). Confronting the negative connection of gossip with women and its progressive denigration as a loose, idle, and unproductive mode of speech, feminists—and other subgroups/counterpublics—have sought to reclaim gossip as a form of subjugated and subversive discourse, resistant to and critical of majority culture. Other gossip theorists in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and communication theory have explored how gossip functions both as an instrument of behavioral control and as a form of exchange in which information is lucratively traded for other goods in the social marketplace. We’ll be drawing on these theorizations of gossip and considering how useful they are for capturing its operations in different historical moments, across oral, scribal, printed, and digital media, and within changing legal and normative conceptions of public-private relations. Most important, we’ll be exploring gossip’s hermeneutic power as a narrative model, pressing the continuities between sites, protocols, and modes of gossip and works of literature which not only thematize its practice but reflect on their own (often troubled) relation to its forms.

The readings for the seminar are yet to be finalized since they depend, to a large extent, on the specialties and enthusiasms of the guest teachers I will be inviting to join us. But here are some sample readings/films to give you an idea of what to expect: Chaucer, The House of Fame and “The Manciple’s Tale”; Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing and Othello; Samuel Pepys, Diary; William Wycherley, The Country Wife; Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year; James Boswell, London Journal; Thomas Jefferson, Anas; Mary Hassal, Secret History; Jane Austen, Emma; Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan; Stephen Early, Alfred Hitchcock, and Eliot Elisofon, “Have You Heard” (Life Magazine, 1942); Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Mike Leigh, Secrets and Lies; Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen); David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network.
If you would like more information about this seminar you’re welcome to contact me at andrea.walkden@qc.cuny.edu