ENGL 5455.03 (Fall Term)
Filming Jane Austen
Prof. David Monoghan
Monday
2:30-4:30
Description:
There is a widespread tendency to privilege literary texts over the films that are adapted from them. A film, then, is often judged by the extent that it remains "faithful" to its written source. This course will challenge that position by proposing that films, which communicate primarily through visual images, can never be "faithful" to written originals except in superficial features such as plot. Thus, meaningful discussion of the adaptation process must proceed from a recognition of the fundamental differences between the two forms and must set aside prejudices about the primacy of the written text.
The theoretical basis for the course will be established by a consideration of some important recent studies of the possibilities and problems inherent in the process of translating a written text into a visual one. The class will then proceed to an analysis of three novels by Jane Austen, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion -- which will be viewed in their historical context and through the lens provided by contemporary critical concerns with gender, race, class, and the body -- and of some of the numerous film and television adaptations of these novels.
While all of these film adaptations are, with one exception, products of the so-called Austen boom of the 1990s, they differ so much, technically and thematically, in their relationship to their source texts that they allow for a comprehensive exploration of the major issues identified by theoretical studies of the adaptation process. A pedagogically motivated, text oriented television serial such as Granada's Persuasion will thus be considered alongside such irreverent contemporary appropriations of Austen as Amy Heckerling's Clueless and Whit Stillman's Metropolitan. Similarly, a commercially motivated exercise in nostalgia, such as Douglas McGraph's Emma, will be examined in relation to films, such as Rozema's Mansfield Park and Andrew Davies/Diarmuid Lawrence's Emma, that seriously explore the gap between Austen's ideological assumptions and historical situation and our own.
Texts:
Primary Text: Jane Austen, Emma
Film adaptations: Emma, writer and director Douglas McGrath, 1996
Jane Austen's "Emma", writer Andrew Davies, director Diarmuid Lawrence, 1996
Clueless, writer and director Amy Heckerling, 1995
Primary Text: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Film adaptations: Mansfield Park, writer and director, Patricia Rozema, 1999
Metropolitan, writer and director, Whit Stillman, 1990
Primary Text: Jane Austen, Persuasion
Film adaptations: Persuasion, writer Julian Mitchell, director Howard Baker, 1971
Persuasion, writer Nick Dear, director Roger Michell, 1995