Iyengar, Sujata
TR 9:35 AM
Park Hall 0139
Investigate the motives, pleasures, and consequences of adapting oral tales, plays, novels, poems, films, musicals, non-fiction texts and other cultural products among different media and genres.
We'll take for our baselines at least one European and one African folk or fairy tale and consider how adaptors and appropriators such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Toni Morrison -- and other filmmakers, musicians, and novelists -- adapt both baseline story or myth and the work of Shakespeare, Austen, and Morrison to other genres, times, and contexts.
For example, we might trace Charles Perrault's Cendrillon (Cinderella) from its origins in the "persecuted heroine" archetype in world folklore through extracts from Samuel Richardson's epistolary epic Pamela to Austen's Pride and Prejudice and to its Disneyfied incarnation and late 20th and early 21st films such as Pretty Woman or Maid in Manhattan.
We could read accounts of the trickster Anansi in African folk tale and see how the enslaved people whose stories Joel Chandler Harris wrote down turned Anansi the spider into the wily Br'er Rabbit--and then contrast Disney's deeply misguided and and offensive stereotypes in the film Song of the South (removed from the Disney channel, but accessible through the Internet Archive) with Charles Chestnutt's and Toni Morrison's use of this figure (and especially the "tar baby"). Such a trajectory might end with Percival Everett's novel Erasure and ifs adaptation to the Oscar-nominated film, American Fiction.
Alongside our primary texts we'll discuss and try out theoretical accounts of adaptation (including translation theory) from Linda Hutcheon, Douglas Lanier, MJ Kidnie, Lawrence Venuti, Roshni Mooneeram and others.
In addition to regular in-class writing or quizzes, students will complete a final project that will ask them to adapt a text and to write an introduction to their work explaining which text they are adapting and why, the theories they read and used to develop their rationale, and why and how they made particular choices in their adaptation.