CINEMA IN ENGLISH

The aim of the course is to provide students with some of the most relevant methodological tools for understanding the phenomena and the theories underlying the relationships between literature and cinema. On on hand, students will increase the critical knowledge acquired in the first three years studies, on the other they will acquire new theoretical tools in order to evaluate the mechanisms and strategies inherent the process of cinematic adaptation.
This module is part of the Double/Joint Degrees’s educational programme which provides an integrated study curriculum in cooperation with other international universities and mobility periods for students. After the final examination, students achieve two or more academic qualifications issued by the partner universities (Double or Multiple Degree) or a jointly conferred qualification recognized and validated by all the partner universities (Joint Degree).

Upon completion of this course, students will hopefully learn to critically read novels and films, as well as to write a paper with coherent arguments and analytic interpretation.
In addition, at the end of the module students should have attained an awareness of the Victorian Age most relevant cultural and social contexts.
The course is taught in English and students are encouraged to participate in class discussions.

Students are required to possess a good degree of proficiency in both written and spoken English. They are also expected to have some familiarity with the Victorian Age, as well as with the core stylistic features of literary postmodernism.

Title: "The Representation of Women in Victorian Fiction"

This module, while providing a general introduction to the literature and culture of the Victorian Age, it deals with the phenomenon of film adaptation of nineteenth and twentieth century literary classics which are characterised by an equally pervasive emphasis on the quest for romantic love, personal freedom and self-fulfilment.
After an introductory unit focusing on the main theories and methods of cinematic adaptation, this module will focus on a close reading and detailed analysis of three novels, exploring in particular prevailing views on women, class prejudice and rigid social stratification in relation to gender, sexual politics, and marriage. By considering Reisz’s and Pinter’s superb adaptation of Fowles’s historiographic metafiction – the novel is set in the years 1867 to 1869 – other issues such as self-reflexive writing, authorial omniscience, open-endedness, postmodernist theory and practice will be also investigated.

Novels
Charlotte Brontë, JANE EYRE (1847)
Henry James, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1881)
John Fowles, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1969)

FILMS
Cary Fukunaga, JANE EYRE (2011)
Jane Campion, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996)
Karel Reisz, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1981)

Secondary readings:

ADAPTATIONS: FROM TEXT TO SCREEN, SCREEN TO TEXT, ed. by D. Cartmell and I. Whelehan, London, New York, Routledge, 1999, pp. 1-28.

JANE EYRE, New Casebook, ed. Heather Glen, pp. 68-91; 168-195.

M. Bell, “Isabel Archer and the Affronting of Plot”, in MEANING IN HENRY JAMES, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, pp. 80-122.

J. Acheson, JOHN FOWLES, London, Macmillan, 1998, pp.

P.Cooper, THE FICTIONS OF JOHN FOWLES, Ottawa, Paris, University of Ottawa Press, 1991, pp. 103-141.

S. Loveday, THE ROMANCES OF JOHN FOWLES London, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 48-81.

Additional readings for non-attendant students:

CHARLOTTE BRONTE’S JANE EYRE, A Casebook, ed. E.B. Michie, Oxford: OUP, 2006, pp. 3- 22. (introduction).

NEW ESSAYS ON THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, ed. J. Porte, Cambridge: CUP, 1990, pp. 1-27 (introduction) plus an essay of your choice.

S. Loveday, THE ROMANCES OF JOHN FOWLES London, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 1-10.

Students will be assessed by a final written exam in English consisting of 2 open questions, 3 critical analysis of a given passage, and finally of a short translation from English into Italian.
Non-native English speakers are not requested to do the translation but to write a critical analysis of the given passage.

Front lectures accompanied by screening of the films indicated in the above bibliography.
The course is taught in English

Class attendance is not mandatory but is highly recommended

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