Focusing on selections from literary works and their adaptations for the screen, this course will examine not only the similarities and differences between literary and cinematic narrative but also the ways in which, since the advent of motion pictures over a century ago, literature has come to incorporate various habits and techniques of cinematic story-telling. A comparison of literary works with their cinematic interpretations will yield an understanding of the devices specific to each medium. Students will be exposed to an array of technical terms, which they will learn to apply to the materials under consideration. Students will likewise learn to situate the cinema historically—to understand it as both an expression of modern life and a means of processing the modernity it helped constitute. Cultural and intellectual developments contemporaneous with cinema’s emergence, such as psychoanalysis and Surrealism, will provide an historical framework for the course. Readings will include: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Rashōmon, Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. Film’s considered will include adaptations of the foregoing by Akira Kurosawa, Francis Ford Coppola, Anthony Minghella, Luchino Visconti, Baz Luhrman and Tomas Alfredson.

Satisfies General Education Requirements:

• Group-Satisfying: Arts and Letters
• Multicultural Courses: International Cultures (IC)