English 391W 9W3A
Senior Seminar:
Jane
and Henry in
Prof.
David Richter
391W: Jane (Austen) and Henry (James) in
W 9:15-12:05 HH 08 DAVID RICHTER
Capstone Course:
English 391W explores in depth significant historical, critical, methodological or theoretical issues within the study of literature, enabling students, as they complete the English major, to reassess their previous work in the field. Readings might be drawn from, for example, a range of historical periods, a variety of genres, or a mix of canonical and non-canonical writings. The course also asks students to think creatively and analytically about literary texts alongside other media, discourses, or modes of critical inquiry and to reflect upon the broader implications of literary studies in relation to other academic disciplines and the world beyond. The course differs from the typical elective in being taught as a small seminar for students with senior standing, allowing for increased student participation and more ambitious individual projects.
Course Description:
This course on
fiction-to-film adaptation will take up the fortunes of two canonical
novelists, Jane Austen and Henry James, who became the unlikely darlings of
Learning Goals:
Gain a sense of the problems and processes
involved in the adaptation to film of a prose fiction narrative, along with the
different ends that film adaptations may serve. Learn how film
adaptations address social, cultural, and political concerns. Learn
about storytelling practices, strategies, and techniques in film and fiction,
and how they function in fiction and film. Recognize and analyze elements
of prose fiction and film narrative, the changes in both story (fabula) and discourse (sjuzet)
that occur in the process of adaptation, and the effects of those changes.
Required Texts:
David
Bordwell & Kristen Thompson, Film Art: An
Introduction 8/e, McGraw-Hill -- ISBN 0073535067.
NOTE: This is a very expensive book and we will be using it primarily as a reference guide to film techniques and terminology. You need this book but you do NOT need this edition. If you need to save money, check bookfinder.com for available used copies of the 7th (or even 6th) edition. The 7th edition’s ISBN is 0072878800—use that to make sure you are getting the right book. Last I looked, there were dozens of used copies available for $10 including postage. BUT you need this book very early in the course so if you are going to order a used book by mail, do it NOW!
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Norton Critical Editions PB
ISBN: 0393976041
Jane
Austen, Emma, Norton Critical Editions, PB ISBN: 0393972844
Henry
James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels, Signet PB ISBN:
0451526066
Henry
James, Washington Square, Oxford World Classics PB ISBN: 0199559198
Henry
James, The Wings of the Dove, Oxford World Classics PB ISBN:
019283861X
Further
secondary materials (e.g. academic articles on fiction/film) will be
distributed via e-reserve. Go to the library webpage http://www.reserve.qc.edu/eres/courseindex.aspx?error=&page=search
Your
password is ric391
Written Work:
One term paper, three response papers on screened films,
three wiki pages, comments on other people’s response papers.
Technical
Matters
This is going to be a relatively high-tech course.
(1) Course Blog: Your short response papers to the
films we show will be posted on our course blog, which you will find online at http://drichter.qwriting.org/ You will also be asked to comment on
other students’ responses. If
you are not familiar with blogging on the qwriting.org site, here is what you
do.
First: Sign up
for an account at qwriting.org. Be sure to
use your qc.cuny.edu email address.
Second: Check your qc.cuny.edu email
for an email from Qwriting. Click the link in the
email to activate your account.
Third: Log in with your new username and password at qwriting.org.
Fourth: Go to drichter.qwriting.org
Fifth: Type the password in the box under the "Add Users"
heading and click to add yourself as an author.
Sixth: To access the Dashboard, click Site Admin under "Meta".
(2) Course Wiki: The first three weeks of the
course will be a film/fiction bootcamp, in which we
will learn about the various techniques that filmmakers use in creating
artistic film narratives. We will
immortalize our insights in the course Wiki, to which everyone will
contribute. To work on (or add to, or study from) the Film
Vocabulary wiki, please go to http://qwriting.org/wiki/index.php/Film_Vocabulary.
(3) Streaming Video: The screening of the films
themselves will be done through a pilot project
of video streaming that the OCT is helping us to set up. Provided that all goes right, you will
be able to log into the secure BlackBoard site for
the course from your home computer (and possibly from your smartphone
or i-tablet) —or from any computer in one of
the college’s computer labs, and watch the films for this course. Let me spell
out what this going to mean in practice: when we meet to discuss the
films on each Wednesday morning you will be expected to have already
watched the film or films that we will be discussing. We will be able to go over parts of the
film in class—I will bring all the films to class on my netbook—but class time is not going to be primarily
devoted to screening the films.
(4) eReserve: Course materials, including recommended
readings, articles on film adaptation, will be put online in the Rosenthal
Library’s eReserve system. These articles are there to help you
with your term paper. Password
ric391. Or I may put the readings
on BlackBoard since you will be going there once a
week or more to watch video.
Schedule for the Course:
Week II. February 9: Boot Camp continues. Modes of adaptation. Showing and Telling in Film and Prose Fiction. Montage. Editing techniques and conventions.
Week III. February 16: Boot Camp concluded.
February 23: Queens College will be on a Monday schedule.
Week IV: March 2: The first Austen feature film. The divine Miss A. meets MGM and the studio system. Film Focus: Robert Z. Leonard, dir., Pride and Prejudice (1940, scr. Aldous Huxley, perf. Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier)
Week V. March 9: Yesterday’s Austen. Film Focus: Joe Wright dir., Pride and Prejudice (2005, scr. Deborah Moggach, perf. Matthew MacFadyen, Keira Knightly)
Week VI. March 16: The Post-Colonial Austen. Film Focus: Gurinder Chadha dir., Bride and Prejudice (2004, scr. Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges)
Week VII. March 23: Austen’s Emma (1815) as novel and film property. Film Focus: Douglas McGrath dir. and scr., Emma (1996, perf. Gwyneth Paltrow) : Diarmuid Lawrence dir., Emma (1996, scr. Andrew Davies, perf. Kate Beckinsale).
Week VIII. March 30: The Austenoids: Sharon Maguire, dir.; Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001); Amy Heckerling, dir. and scr., Clueless (1995). [[ Other Austenoids: Whit Stillman, dir and scr., Metropolitan (Mansfield Park); Victor Nunez, dir and scr, Ruby in Paradise (Northanger Abbey).]]
Week IX.. April 6: Introducing Mr. Henry James. “Daisy Miller” (1878). Film Focus: Peter Bogdanovich, dir., Daisy Miller (1974, scr. Frederic Raphael, perf. Cybill Shepherd).
Week X. April 13: : The Turn of the Screw (1898). Film Focus: Jack Clayton, The Innocents (1961, scr. William Archibald and Truman Capote, add. dial. John Mortimer)
Spring
Vacation: April 17-26
Week XI. April 27: Washington Square (1880). Film Focus: William Wyler, dir., The Heiress, (1949, scr. Augustus and Ruth Goetz, perf. Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift)
Week XII. May 4: Film Focus: Washington Square (1997, Agnieszka Holland, dir., Carol Doyle, scr.)
Week XIII. May 11 The Wings of the Dove (1902).Film Focus: Iain Softley, dir., The Wings of the Dove (1997, scr. Hossein Amini, perf. Helena Bonham Carter).
Week XIV. May 18: Final class period –nothing assigned, but things take longer than we think.
Week XV: May 25: Final session (exam week; no final examination).
Blogposts:
You are to do three response papers to the films we will discuss: reserve the films you want to blog on by emailing me. The posts should be short (I’m thinking around 500 words) and definitely without “padding”; boring the reader is so not the point. You can take up the film globally (discussing or questioning the interpretation of the written text which the film adaptation makes) or you can address specific issues (screenplay, camera work, pacing and editing, soundtrack, performances). Comments are definitely in order by the rest of the class: this is just another form of “class discussion. Comments can be on content or on the writing: if you found the response paper unclear, help the writer to do better next time.
Go
to the course blog at http://drichter.qwriting.org/
for technical instructions about how to post.
Wiki Instructions—TBA
Term Paper Instructions
The major written work for this course is one term paper of 12-20 pages (more if necessary).
Term papers have a topic and a thesis about that topic. You get to choose the topic, although it should conform to the subject-matter of this course, which is Film Adaptations of the Novels and Stories of Jane Austen and Henry James. (Television miniseries counts as film, for our purposes.)
If you want to work on film adaptations of works by a different author or authors, I would hope that the texts would be in something like the tradition of Austen and James. (In other words, an adaptation of novels by E.M. Forster or Virginia Woolf would work for me but not something like Gone with the Wind or Lord of the Rings or The Passion of the Christ.)
As I have mentioned, there are translations (which can attempt to be more or less literal), adaptations (which may be updated or otherwise shifted into a different cultural space), and what might be called imitations (films that are inspired and shaped by a literary text without being an attempt to fully render that text – for example, Sharon Maguire’s film adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) moves Helen Fielding’s novel, set in contemporary London, into the orbit of Pride and Prejudice; and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), set in New York, which does the same for Austen’s Mansfield Park.
Your thesis can involve one film or more than one film. Compare and contrast is one good strategy, and you will find on the filmography (pp 3-6 of the syllabus at http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/ENGLISH/Staff/richter/391.pdf ) all the film adaptations of Austen and James I know about, including some competing versions we will not have screened in class.
Or you may want to work on the career of a particular director or writer who has made several adaptations -- for instance, director James Ivory has made adaptations of James’s The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), and The Golden Bowl (2000).
The thesis is also up to you, although I would like to review and okay (or reject) your theses in advance. If you want to critique your thesis before you send it up to me for my own critique, you will find help at my friend Jack Lynch’s page about developing a thesis, at his website: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/EngPaper/thesis.html See particularly what Jack calls the “Well, duh!” test. His page contains links to other sites with pointers about academic writing that are very helpful. One of those wonderful sites is that created by Dan White and Jeannine DeLombard from the Erindale campus of the University of Toronto – it has all you need to know about planning, writing, citation of sources, and revision. http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/~dwhite/papers.htm
One special problem for this class may be “quoting” a movie, which involves clipping a single frame from a DVD to illustrate your thesis. You can do this by downloading a program called PowerDVD, which will play a DVD on your computer, and which has a “screen capture” feature that will copy a still picture to your hard disk. See http://classweb.gmu.edu/tec/video/powerdvd/PDstill.html for information on the process. This is by no means the only way of doing this.
All
papers are due May 19. Please submit an e-copy of the paper (that is,
send me the paper as email, to drichter@nyc.rr.com
), whether or not you submit a hard copy of the paper. Late
papers will be accepted, but I plan to be out of the country in late May, so
there may need to be incompletes and make-up grades. If you are
graduating this term, this may not be an option you will want to exercise.
Contact Information:
Office: KL 639. Office Hours: 1:40-3:00 W. Office phone: 718-997-4667. Email: david.richter@qc.cuny.edu
Filmography: Films for Study, Oral Reports and Writing
(some of them will be shown during class time)
Major films and miniseries based on Jane Austen:
Sense and Sensibility (1809)
Sense and Sensibility (1995, Ang Lee, dir., Emma Thompson scr.; Emma Thompson, Kate Winslett, Hugh Grant, perf)
Rajiv Menon, dir. and scr., Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000, Tamil, English title I Have Found It)
Pride and Prejudice (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1940, Robert Z. Leonard, dir., Aldous Huxley, scr.,; Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, perf; MGM)
Pride and Prejudice (1995, Simon Langton, dir., Andrew Davies, scr., for A&E and BBC)
Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001, Sharon Maguire, dir)
Pride and Prejudice – A Latter-Day Comedy (2003, Andrew Black, dir., Anne Black scr.,)
Bride and Prejudice (2004, Gurinder Chadha, dir. and scr.,. Paul Mayeda Berges co-scr)
Pride and Prejudice (2005, Joe Wright dir. Deborah Moggach scr.)
Mansfield
Park
Emma (1815)
Clueless (1995 - Amy Heckerling, dir. and scr.,)
Emma (1996 - Diarmuid Lawrence, dir.,scr. Andrew Davies , BBC)
Emma (1996 - Douglas McGrath, dir. and scr., Miramax)
Emma (2009-2010 – Jim O’Hanlon dir, Sandy Welch, scr, BBC)
Persuasion (1817)
Persuasion (1995 - Roger Michell, dir., Nick Dear scr.,)
Northanger Abbey (1817)
Northanger Abbey (1986 - Giles Foster, dir.,Maggie Wadey scr.,, BBC)
Major Films based on Henry James
The Ghostly Rental (1876)
The Haunting of Hell House (1998 - Mitch Marcus dir.)
Daisy Miller (1878)
Daisy Miller (1976 - Peter Bogdanovich, dir; Frederic Raphael, scr)
The Europeans (1878)
The Europeans (1979 - James Ivory, dir and scr; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, scr, 1979)
The Heiress (1949 – William Wyler, dir, Ruth and Augustus Goetz, scr, based on their play)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Portrait of a Lady (1968 – James Cellan Jones, dir; Jack Pulman scr)
The Portrait of a Lady (1996 – Jane Campion, dir; Laura Jones, scr)
The Bostonians (1886)
The Bostonians (1984 – James Ivory, dir; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, scr)
The Aspern Papers (1888)
The Lost Moment (1947 – Martin Gabel, dir; Leonardo Bercovicci, scr)
Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (1978 - James Ivory, dir; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, scr)
The Altar of the Dead (1895)
La Chambre verte (1978 – The Green Room - Francois Truffaut, dir and scr)
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
The Innocents (1962 – Jack Clayton, dir; William Archibald and Truman Capote, scr; add. dial John Mortimer, Deborah Kerr, perf)
The Nightcomers (1971 – Michael Winner, dir; Michael Hastings, scr; Marlon Brando, perf; note: this is a “prequel” to The Turn of the Screw)
The Turn of the Screw (1974 – Dan Curtis, dir; William F. Nolan, scr; Lynn Redgrave, perf)
Presence of Mind (1999 – Antoni Aloy, dir and scr; Barbara Cogny, scr.; Lauren Bacall and Harvey Keitel, perf)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Wings of the Dove (1997 – Iain Softley, dir; Hossein Amini, scr; Helena Bonham Carter perf)
Under Heaven (1998 – Meg Richman, dir and scr; Joely Richardson, perf)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
The Golden Bowl (1973 – James Cellan Jones, dir; Jack Pulman, scr; Gayle Hunnicut, Barry Morse, Daniel Massey, Cyril Cusack, perf)
The Golden Bowl (2000 – James Ivory, dir; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, scr; Uma Thurman, Kate Beckinsale, Jeremy Northam, Nick Nolte, perf)
The Sense of the Past (1917)
I’ll Never Forget You (1951 – Roy Ward Baker, dir; John Balderston and Ranald MacDougal, scr; Tyrone Power, Ann Blyth, Michael Rennie perf)
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970 - Vincente Minelli, dir; Alan Jay Lerner, scr; Barbara Streisand, Yves Montand, Jack Nicholson)