ClassInfo

How do we read literature? What is literature? And what is reading? This class will attempt to explore those questions through an unusual approach: by focusing on literary adaptation. By looking at the edge of the literary, we will try to identify what is unique to the literary mode, whether literature can truly be adapted, and what is at stake in that process. Does an adapted literary work cease to be literature? Does it cease to be art? What happens to a book when it is turned into a movie? Can its literary essence be translated? Through this exploration we will attempt to highlight the essential quality that we might call "the literary." By focusing on the border between the literary and the cinematic, this class will emphasize the unique qualities of literature and, through transposition and comparison, it will give us a richer understanding of literature itself.

To foreground the questions of literary essence, of the centrality of words and the self-reflexive aspect of literature, this class is organized around unusual adaptations. We will focus on literature that presents challenges to its readers, books that are modernist, obtuse, formalist, or otherwise weird. These books force readers into an unusual relationship with the text - they promise a personal revelation to anyone willing to open their mind to a transformative experience but they also present serious challenges to seamless adaptation or straightforward interpretation. By exploring particularly "unadaptable" literature, this course hopes to highlight the literary quality, making us conscious of our presence as readers. We will read novels and poems, literary criticism and theory; we will watch films, and we will even try our hand at an adaptation of our own. We will leave this semester with a deeper understanding of literature, adaptation, modernism, and the social and political stakes of literary adaptation, an increasingly relevant issue in our age of comic book and intellectual property-driven mass culture.