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Adaptation: Text, Image, Culture

Module description

The process of adapting material between media, including literary forms, such as scripts, short stories, novels and plays and visual forms, including film, television and others is one of the oldest, most dominant and most ubiquitous strategies in the creative industries. By analysing a wide range of adaptations in different forms you will be able to understand the rich and complex relationships between textual and visual media at distinct historical moments and in specific cultural contexts. This module offers you the opportunity to understand adaptation as a creative process and adaptations as cultural products.

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module aims

• To engage you in the study of adaptations in diverse forms, genres and styles across various media. These adaptations are analysed in the light of theories of text, authorship, genre and cross-cultural exchange.
• To develop your capacity for interdisciplinary thinking across subjects, across historical and contemporary media, and across different national contexts.
• To give you an understanding of the creative processes and the workings of creative industries in shaping, visualising and circulating literary narratives and cultural forms.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate a critical understanding of the aesthetic, theoretical and cultural questions which arise from the transformations between written and verbal texts
• 2. Show an understanding of the critical debates about adaptation, authorship, genre and cross-cultural translation in relation to adaptations
• 3. Understand the historical, cultural and/or industrial contexts of specific adaptations

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Analyse films and other media of different periods and cultures and relate their concerns and modes of expression to historical and cultural contexts
• 5. Apply your interdisciplinary skills in close formal, thematic, generic and authorial analysis of different kinds of media
• 6. Research and evaluate relevant interdisciplinary critical and historical materials for the study of film and other media.
• 7. Understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and apply these ideas to varied media

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 8. Demonstrate advanced communication skills and an ability to work both individually and in groups
• 9. Deploy appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument and a capacity to write clear and correct prose
• 10. Question assumptions, distinguish between fact and opinion, and critically reflect on your learning process

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Theories of Adaptation
• Adaptation and Authorship
• The Practices of Adaptation
• Adaptation and Intermediality
• Genres in Adaptation
• Adaptation and the creative industries
• Adaptation as a trans-cultural process

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Sample Reading:

• Diane Wynn Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle (1986)
• James M Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860)
• Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)
• Daphne du Maurier, ‘The Birds’ (1952) from The Birds and Other Stories (2004)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
• William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606)
• Linda Hutcheon A Theory of Adaptation: Second Edition,   New York and London: Routledge, 2012 (also available on Kindle)

 Sample secondary Reading:

• Timothy Corrigan, Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 2012
• Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge, 2011
• Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, A Companion to Literature and Film. Oxford, Blackwell, 2007
• Steven Price, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism. London: Palgrave, 2010
• Cristina Della Colletta, When Stories Travel: Cross Cultural Encounters Between Fiction and Film. John Hopkins University Press, 2012
• Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 

Sample Films:

• The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013)
• The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964)
• The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
• Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)
• Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE2 site
  

Indicative learning resources - Other resources

• Archival sources in the University of Exeter Heritage Collections: http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/about/special/ 
• Film-related collections in The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture: https://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk

Key words search

Interdisciplinary, adaptation, film, literature, tv, graphic novel, creative industries, multimedia, cross cultural, translation