From Legend to Blockbuster: Fantasizing Antiquity in World Cinema

Cinema can be a space par excellence where classical legends are told and retold within national literary traditions. From a thunder god falling for a modern scientist to a green snake spirit with feminist consciousness, from Kurosawa’s “ogreless” Rashomon to a black Orpheus singing Bossa Nova, cinematic adaptation, whether across formalistic, media, or linguistic boundaries, creates a co-space that links us to the past while in the meantime, inspires new literary visions beyond the limit of space and time. This course offers a critical experience of the rhetoric of reworking antiquity in mass culture through the dynamic created by the interaction between the filmic potentiality of literary texts and the transnational imagination in the cinematic adaptation of national literary canon, which fabricates the resplendent texture of a transmedial aesthetics.