• Home
  • Awards
  • Books
    • Edited Volumes
    • Book Chapters
    • Journal Articles
    • Book Reviews
  • Lectures
  • Conferences
  • Teaching
  • Galleries
  • Links
  • Contact
  • News

Joseph M. Conte

~ Professor of English, University at Buffalo

Joseph M. Conte

Category Archives: Teaching

English 645: Cosmopolitanism and the Global Novel, Spring 2019

28 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by Joseph Conte in Graduate Seminars, Teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Graduate Seminars, Post-9/11 Global Novel

Beyond GlobalizationIn an epoch of global economic interdependency, there has been a concomitant globalization of culture. On the one hand, the homogenization of culture through the dispersal of consumer goods and the saturation of mass media destroys the indigenous and authentic artifact. Native languages and religious practices, ethnic foods, handicraft arts and clothing, traditional music and entertainment face slow extinction. On the other hand, the transnational culture that arises may provide positive attributes through crosspollination or eclecticism that more readily acquaints one culture with the unique differences of another, sometimes leading to creative appropriation, pluralism, tolerance, and exposure to alternative systems of belief.

Cosmopolitanism has its origin in the assertion by Diogenes Laërtius, “I am a citizen of the world,” that he is kosmou politês, meaning that he did not identify with his local origin or caste but rather defined himself in terms of universalism and compassion for the other. But such a cosmopolitanism defined as katholikos (catholic, “universal”) has not been sufficiently extended in modernity to non-Western cultures. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have proposed a transversalism that resists both the hegemony and homogeneity of late-capitalist globalization by highlighting incommensurable cultural differences and exposure to alternative idioms. Transversal cosmopolitans not only agree to shared values with others but submit to a “shared deterritorialization” in which they are as much operated upon by transversalism, altered in their conception of origin, participant in a line of becoming, mobile in state and cultural identity, as they are operating in a transversal exchange with the other. Transversals are oblique, “double captures” with the potential for change that affects both elements in a correspondence. The global novel is one such expression of transversal politics, not in an effort to arrive dialectically at mutual reassurances but as narratives that expose and foreground the différend which resists translation into a single global idiom.

Global novels transcend the traditional borders of national literatures, native languages, colonialism, racial and ethnic divides, and religion. These fictions both represent and critique the technological consumerism, transnational politics, and cultural conflicts of migration that have come to dominate globalism. Its authors—and sometimes their texts—are bi- or multilingual, even as the world Anglophone novel trades in an English language that has become the lingua franca of an increasingly cosmopolitan citizenry. We will ask whether the global novel can be “ours” in the same manner as a national literature or in the form of shared humanitarian values—like the “white helmet” volunteers of the Syrian crisis—of liberality, human rights, and a progressive, social democracy, or whether such novels are merely another item on the checkout receipt of the marketplace of popular ideas and entertainment.

Works for extended discussion may include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013); Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (2007); Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (2006); Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (2013) or What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006); Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2012); Ha Jin, Nanjing Requiem (2012); Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) or Exit West (2017); Adam Kirsch, Writing the World in the 21st Century (2016); Colum McCann, TransAtlantic (2014); Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011); Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (2006); Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003); Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country? (2002); Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003); W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992); Mariano Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (2014); Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000) or NW (2013). Other literary and critical readings will be available through UB Learns or on graduate course reserve.

Course requirements will include a twenty-minute seminar presentation by all enrolled students and a twenty-page research paper from those students registered intensively.

 

English 379: Film Adaptation of the Novel, Spring 2019

28 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by Joseph Conte in Teaching, Undergraduate Courses

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Film Adaptation, Undergraduate Courses

cloud-atlas-film-tie-inThis online installment of Film Genres will examine film adaptations of the contemporary novel. Literary fiction provides a rich, original source for story, character and setting in feature films. And yet the director, screenwriter, and actors are inevitably faced with challenges in successfully transferring a predominantly textual art into a visual and auditory medium. Especially with well-known classic works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), recently adapted by director Baz Luhrmann, the problem of fidelity to the original novel arises. The editing of long prose fictions to fit within the typical two-hour duration of feature films gives the most gifted screenwriter migraines. Sometimes, however, a script may be augmented with scenes or characters not present in the original for a coherent representation of the story on screen. Literature that heavily relies on interior monologue and narration rather than external dramatic action or dialogue poses a nearly insurmountable hurdle for adaptation. We should also consider that novels are most often sole-authored works of the imagination that, in the words of Irish writer and humorist Flann O’Brien, are “self-administered in private,” while films are very much collective enterprises demanding the skills of hundreds of people and, ideally, screened in public theaters to large appreciative audiences.

First, we’ll read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), with its six overlapping storylines and recurrent characters; and then compare its ambitious adaptation by directors Tom Tykwer, Lana and Lilly Wachowski (The Matrix Trilogy) in 2012. We’ll then read Ian McEwan’s historical novel of class and moral responsibility, Atonement (2001), set in England in 1935, during World War II, and in present day England. Its adaptation by director Joe Wright in 2007 confronts the multiple historical settings and the complex subjectivity of the novel’s characters.

Next on the program will be a novel by a postmodern writer whose challenging work has been resistant to adaptation. We’ll read Thomas Pynchon’s psychedelic  detective novel, Inherent Vice (2009), and then ponder Paul Thomas Anderson’s truly “gonzo” adaptation (2014), featuring Joaquin Phoenix as the pot-smoking private eye, Larry “Doc” Sportello, which must be one of the weirdest literary-filmic adventures you can have—without the influence of cannabis or other psycho-pharmaceuticals. Mohsin Hamid, who appeared in Just Buffalo’s Babel series in October, is renowned for his novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a monologue by a Princeton-educated Pakistani émigré who returns to Lahore after 9/11 to lecture in the classroom against American imperialism. The suspenseful confrontation at a Lahore café between Changez and a nameless American, most likely a CIA operative, is brilliantly captured on film by Indian director Mira Nair (2012).

This course will be conducted online through UB Learns, with streaming of films through the Multimedia Library’s Digital Campus online service. Students will be required to participate in weekly graded blogs and complete two writing assignments and peer reviews on the novels and films.

 

English 301: Criticism (Fall 2017)

31 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by Joseph Conte in Teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Criticism, Postmodernism

Escaping Criticism, Pere Borrell de Caso (1874)

Pere Borrell de Caso, Escaping Criticism (1874)

This version of Criticism will be devoted to the problem of postmodernism. We struggle to find an appropriate definition for an historical period that may have begun, according to architectural theorist Charles Jencks, on July 15, 1972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis was demolished, and may have ended with the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. For some, postmodernity cannot be defined, or is so beset with a deep form of irony that no definitive statement about it could possibly apply. We can, however, address certain issues that arise in the debates on postmodernism. Jean-François Lyotard argues that postmodernism is accompanied by incredulity, a new skepticism toward the grand narratives of Western culture, or the Big Lies. Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson suggests that the style of postmodernism is nothing more than the hyperinflation of a consumer economy, or the Big Buys. Charles Jencks contends that all postmodern buildings—and by extension, the images we encounter in our environment—are “double coded,” with aspects of both popular and elite culture. And, of course, there is irony. As Umberto Eco says, in his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, it is no longer possible to say “I love you madly.” It only possible to say, because romance novelist Barbara Cartland has already said it, “As Barbara Cartland says, ‘I love you madly.’”

We will read several essays on postmodernity collected in Jencks, ed. The Post-Modern Reader, 2nd ed. (2011). But since our goal will be to “perform” criticism, we’ll also read three fictions that respond to the question of postmodernity directly or indirectly: Margaret Atwood’s dystopian (and newly relevant) feminist novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986); Paul Auster’s reflexive detective novel, City of Glass (1985), and Don DeLillo’s satire of simulacral culture, White Noise (1985). In two midsemester writing assignments and a final critical essay, we will try to ascertain the degree to which the theory and practice of postmodernism are related.

English 357: Cyberpunk Literature and Virtuality

09 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by Joseph Conte in Teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Undergraduate Courses

Neurotransmitter

Neurotransmitter

Winter 2016, University at Buffalo
Online Course, January 4-22, 2016

During the 1980s and into the 1990s an almost imperceptible and underground transformation in our cultural imagination took place, as our dependence on the analogue media of print, broadcast television and celluloid film slowly gave way to a digital information culture that William Gibson termed “cyberspace” in his novel, Neuromancer (1984). While the public waited for Tim Berners-Lee to fashion a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and Marc Andreesen to code the first widely used Web browser, enabling a boringly commercial hypermedia known as the World Wide Web, the legacy media of science fiction and cinema took it upon themselves to imagine a dynamic, immersive, resistant and culturally diverse virtual reality. It’s not exactly what we got by the millennium; or, as Lawrence “Yogi” Berra is reputed to have said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” But that is the world of Cyberpunk, populated by techno-adept hackers and socially marginalized types, combining the grunge aesthetic of Punk music, the gritty realism of Film Noir, and the postmodern theory of a Simulacral society. In this condensed, three-week Winter session, we will read three classics of the cyberpunk genre: the aforementioned Neuromancer, whose antihero Case “jacks into” the Matrix of cybernetic war and trolls the dystopian Sprawl; Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991), in which the map of the mind becomes the territory of real space; and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1993), featuring Hiro Protagonist, whose digital avatar pursues a virus capable of infecting the cerebral cortex. We will complement these three works of fiction with three popular films in which virtual space overwhelms our Euclidean world: the millennial apocalypse of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995); an alternate world in which reality is a deceptive digital representation in the Wachowskis’s The Matrix (1999); and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), in which computer gaming becomes all too real. This course will be conducted online through UB Learns, with digital streaming of the films. Students will be required to participate in weekly graded discussion boards and writing assignments on both novels and films.

English 357: Contemporary Literature: The Social Novel

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by Joseph Conte in Teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Contemporary Literature

University at Buffalo Department of English
Summer 2015, Second Session, July 6-August 14
Online Course

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

This installment of Contemporary Literature will examine the revival of the social novel prompted by Jonathan Franzen and exemplified by his recent book, Freedom (2010), which depicts a middle-American dysfunctional family. His brand of social realism is characterized by the objective representation of recognizable types (ourselves, only slightly embellished), in a prose style that mimics the contemporary vernacular (our voices, barely, if at all, embellished), and encompassing conflicts (the discontents of family and married life; substance abuse and psychological debilities; loneliness in a time of social media) that are ordinary, if only slightly more desperate than our own.

In point of contrast, we’ll then read Zadie Smith’s prize-winning debut novel, White Teeth (2000), which stirs together a postmodern fabulist style with a multinational and multiethnic cast of characters in London, England. More self-conscious in its bearing and more attuned to global culture and its transnational conflicts, Smith’s novel will in both style and content allow us to evaluate two prominent strains in contemporary fiction beyond the often insular American market.

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

As both of these novels are substantial in length, we’ll spend approximately half of the brief summer session with each, supplementing our reading of the texts with required nonfiction essays on the social novel and multicultural literature. Because this course will be conducted online through UB Learns, students will be required to participate in weekly graded discussion boards on the novels. In addition to these short responses, there will be two essays that will be likewise submitted through UB Learns.

English 645: Postmodern Fiction and Information Culture

19 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Joseph Conte in Teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Postmodern Fiction and Information Culture

University at Buffalo

Fall 2015

New Media

New Media

The paradigm shift from analogue to digital culture should be acknowledged as a defining aspect of postmodernism. A complex dynamics of incommensurability arises in periods of technological overlap. In the Kuhnian model the new paradigm supplants the practices and forms of the old and renders them obsolete. But a model of remediation suggests that all new media refashion and sublimate old media. The incommensurability of print and digital media incites creativity in—and thus disturbs, but does not eradicate—the older, established forms of literature. Modulations in the form of the novel—the concept of what a “novel” might consist of, how its structure as a bound codex might be manipulated—are provoked by the introduction of digital media. While photography did not supplant painting in the nineteenth century, its capacity for documentary detail compelled the artist to reexamine the conventions of mimesis, challenge the genteel rules of subject matter and foreground the painterly medium of color and light. In the twentieth century broadcast television arises as literary fiction’s dominant technological other. And yet TV’s one-to-many delivery of infotainment to a passive audience instigated an interactive, plural and multimodal print fiction. The disturbing presence of broadcast and digital media has not made the novel disappear; rather, new media has made the most compelling fictions those that generate associative logic instead of the causal sequence of plot, parallel processing instead of serial in discourse, and multimodal design instead of the block print page. The reader’s apprehension of the textual condition displaces the conduit metaphor of communication; reflexivity in the narrative dispels absorption in the text-world.

Memories of My Father Watching TV

Memories of My Father Watching TV

During the seminar, we’ll alternate between readings of postmodern novelists who provocatively engage with the terms and conditions of information culture and theorists who invoke the surfeit of information and the hyperconnectivity that characterizes broadcast and digital media. We’ll begin with writers who question the antagonistic relationship between literary fiction and television as the dominant mass media in the postwar period, including David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993) and “My Appearance” (1989); and Curtis White’s Memories of My Father Watching TV (1998). Next we’ll survey the advent of virtual reality (VR) in a selection of cyberpunk fiction including: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which features a Hiro Protagonist whose digital avatar pursues a virus capable of infecting the cerebral cortex; Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991), in which the map of the mind becomes the territory of real space; and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), which delves into the post-Cold War world of multinational corporate communications. Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (2000) switches between narratives that correlate the sensory deprivation of a hostage in an empty room in Beirut and the efforts of a Seattle-based group to project a virtual reality on the blank walls of “the Cavern.” We’ll finish with the Avant-Pop movement that splices the corruscations and convergences of the avant-garde and popular media culture in work by Larry McCaffery, Mark Leyner, Kathy Acker and Samuel R. Delany.

Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition

Our fiction readings will be informed by excerpts from a variety of critical and theoretical texts on information culture, virtual reality and digital media, including: Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspective on Ergodic Literature; Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies; Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media; David Ciccoricco, Reading Network Fiction; Joseph Conte, Design & Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction; Jane Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books; Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris, ed. The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction; Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”; N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts; Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter; Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics; George Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology; Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace; William Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information; Mark Poster, What’s the Matter with the Internet?; Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions; and Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb.

English 447: The Literature and Film of Immigration

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by Joseph Conte in Teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Literature and Film of Immigration

University at Buffalo

Fall 2015

Online Course

Mulberry Street, New York City (c. 1900)

Mulberry Street, New York City (c. 1900)

The path of immigration into the United States extends from the halls of Ellis Island to the globalized migration of the twenty-first century. First-generation immigrants are often driven to these shores by the blight of poverty or the sting of religious or political persecution; hope to make for themselves a fabled but often factitious “better life”; and are riven between the desire to retain old-world customs and language and the appeal of new-world comforts and technological advances. Second-generation immigrants face the duality of a national identity—striving to become recognized as “real Americans”—and an ethnic heritage that they wish to honor and sustain but which marks them as always an “other.” Here we encounter the hyphenated status of the preponderance of “natural born” American citizens. The third-generation descendent will have only indirect or acquired familiarity with his or her ethnic heritage; the loss of bilingualism or at best a second language acquired in school; and frequently a multiethnic identity resulting from the complex scrabble of American life in a mobile, suburban, and professionalized surrounding.

We will view films and read a selection of both fiction and memoir that reflect the immigrant experience in this country. Jacob Riis documents the penury and hardship of tenement life among the newly arrived underclass in How the Other Half Lives (1890). Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers (1925) treats the conflict between a devout, old-world Jewish father and a daughter who wishes to be a modern independent woman. We’ll want to compare Yezierska’s immigrant experience of 1900 with the Soviet-era migration of Russian Jews to New York in Gary Shteyngart’s comic autobiography Little Failure (2014). Mount Allegro (1989), Jerre Mangione’s memoir of growing up in the Sicilian enclave of Rochester, NY, portrays ethnicity that is insular, protective of its “imported from Italy” values, and yet desperate to find recognition as an authentic version of “Americanness.” The film Big Night (1996), directed by Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci, serves up Italian food with abbondanza, “rich abundance,” but not a single Mafioso. In his long career as an English teacher and barroom raconteur, Frank McCourt preserved the harrowing story of his youth in Limerick, Ireland and New York for Angela’s Ashes (1997) and ‘Tis (1999); like so many immigrant families, the McCourts re-emigrated between transatlantic failures. We’ll screen the film adaptation of Angela’s Ashes, directed by Alan Parker, and read the second volume of his autobiography. Junot Díaz, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), follows the “Ghetto Nerd,” his voluptuous sister and hot-tempered mother between urban-industrial Paterson, New Jersey and their Dominican homeland. Finally, we’ll view the docufiction film, Who Is Dayani Cristal? starring Gael García Bernal and directed by Marc Silver, which retraces the journey made by a migrant laborer whose desiccated body was found in Arizona’s forbidding Sonora Desert.

Who Is Dayani Cristal?

Who Is Dayani Cristal?

As this is an exclusively online course, our discussion of these books and films will take place in the UB Learns environment. Writing assignments on ethnicity, identity and migration will be shared and critiqued among class members in the UB Learns discussion boards throughout the semester.

English 383A: Transnational Politics and the Post-9/11 Novel

24 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by Joseph Conte in Teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Post-9/11 Literature

Spring 2015

University at Buffalo

Beyond Globalization: Beijing, China

Beyond Globalization: Beijing, China

Literature after September 11, 2001 reflects a shift from the provincial politics of nation-states to that of transnational politics—issues that require adjudication across national, geographic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and racial borders. In the epoch of globalization, these are conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without the cooperation and understanding of diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests. If the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought to a close an overt dichotomy in international politics and deprived Western writers of a reliable foil, the events of 9/11 not only redirected our “intelligence community” from counter-espionage to counter-terrorism but also compelled writers to attend to a multilateral political terrain. This new political paradigm is both transnational and asymmetrical. The system of global capitalism, for which the secular ideals of representative democracy are a thinly disguised “advance man,” contends with the emergent threat of a transnational theocracy that is resistant to the agnostic, graphical, and consumerist Western ideology.

Chris Corder (2001): 911 Apocalypse

Chris Corder (2001): 911 Apocalypse

We will read some works of fiction that directly represents the events of 9/11 and others that reflect changes in the political and cultural milieu in its aftermath. Don DeLillo has called this the “Age of Terror,” and in Falling Man (2007), he eschews documentary realism in favor of representing 9/11 through the cognitive and psychological trauma of a World Trade Center survivor whose recuperation is the beginning of a “counternarrative” to terrorism. Orhan Pamuk sets Snow (2004) in the village of Kars in far eastern Turkey, away from the multicultural city of Istanbul that links Europe and Asia, in order to foreground the tensions and resistance between Islam and Turkey’s secular state as girls, forbidden to wear head scarves to school, commit suicide. J. M. Coetzee, in Diary of a Bad Year (2007), fashions a multi-tracked narrative in which the author-surrogate Señor C. ventures a series of “strong opinions” on anarchism, terrorism, the state, Al Qaida, democracy and so on that question the purpose of writing in an ethically confused and disputatious world.

Graydon Parrish, The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, 2002-2006 September 11th, 2001

Graydon Parrish, The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, 2002-2006 September 11th, 2001

These and other works of contemporary fiction—including Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011), and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008)—suggest that, rather than suffering from self-absorption and disaffection, innovative fictions have engaged global politics. As Pamuk contends, it is through novels that world citizens do their deepest thinking about themselves.

Kathryn Bigelow, dir. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Kathryn Bigelow, dir. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

We’ll also screen films that present differing views of the role of state power in the transnational political drama, including Kathryn Bigelow, dir. Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Alain Brigand, prod. 11’09″01 September 11 (2002), and Errol Morris, dir. Standard Operating Procedure (2008).

 

English 353: Experimental Fiction: Multimodality in the Novel

24 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by Joseph Conte in Teaching

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Experimental Fiction

Mel Bochner, Language Is Not Transparent (1970)

Mel Bochner, Language Is Not Transparent (1970)

Spring 2015

University at Buffalo

We will read a selection of “books” that question every aspect of what it means to be a print novel. These are multimodal works that integrate text, pictures and design elements; and yet they are books you can’t read on a Kindle™. We experience multimodality as the environment of our daily life, in various platforms that include the urban streetscape, art galleries, digital “desktops” and other electronic media. Multimodality is as new as the iPhone with its “app” icons and voice assistant, Siri, but as old as the New England Primer. Multimodal literature both resists and appropriates digital technology in the print medium. Most literary works are language-centered: they call on the reader’s store of linguistic competency and comprehension of the text, but they subordinate or exclude pictorial or graphic elements. The experience of reading a multimodal novel, however, requires that the reader negotiate between the verbal and the visual, always aware that the bound book is also an expert technology. We will examine the effects of multiple reading paths on narrative structure; the physical manipulation required to read these books; and the “self-conscious” reading that is required by works that call attention to themselves as books.

Tom Phillips, A Humument

Tom Phillips, A Humument (1980)

Works for extended discussion will include: Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006); Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010); B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (2009); Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun) (2008); Tom Phillips’s A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (fifth edition, 2012); Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic (2011); and Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2004).

English 357: Film Adaptation of the Novel

24 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by Joseph Conte in Teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Contemporary Literature

Winter Session 2015

University at Buffalo

Cloud Atlas

This installment of Contemporary Literature will examine film adaptations of the novel. Literary fiction provides a rich, original source for story, character and setting in feature films. And yet the director, screenwriter, and actors are inevitably faced with challenges in successfully transferring a predominantly textual art into a visual and auditory medium. Especially with well-known classic works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), recently adapted by director Baz Luhrman, the problem of fidelity to the original novel arises. The editing of long prose fictions to fit within the typical two-hour duration of feature films gives the most gifted screenwriter migraines. Sometimes, however, a script must be augmented with scenes or characters not present in the original for a coherent representation of the story on screen. Literature that heavily relies on interior monologue and narration rather than external dramatic action or dialogue poses a nearly insurmountable hurdle for adaptation. And we should consider that novels are most often sole-authored works of the imagination that, in the words of Irish writer and humorist Flann O’Brien, are “self-administered in private,” while films are very much collective enterprises demanding the skills of hundreds of people and, ideally, screened in public theaters to large appreciative audiences. In this compressed winter session we will have time to consider carefully two bestselling and critically acclaimed novels and their nearly as successful film adaptations. We’ll first read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), with its six overlapping storylines and recurrent characters; and we’ll view its ambitious adaptation by directors Tom Tykwer, Andy and Lana Wachowski (The Matrix Trilogy) in 2012. AtonementThen we’ll read Ian McEwan’s historical novel of class and moral responsibility, Atonement (2001), set in England in 1935, during World War II, and in present day England. Its adaptation by director Joe Wright in 2007 confronts the multiple historical settings and the complex subjectivity of the novel’s characters. This course will be conducted online through UB Learns, with digital streaming of the films. Students will be required to participate in weekly graded discussion boards and writing assignments on both novels and films.

Joseph Conte

Professor of English
University at Buffalo

Recent Posts

  • Northeast Modern Language Association Convention 2022
  • The Encyclopedia of American Fiction, 1980-2020
  • UB English News
  • Feminist Research Alliance Workshop
  • Feminist Research Alliance Workshop

Archives

  • April 2022
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • November 2018
  • September 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • April 2018
  • February 2018
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • May 2017
  • February 2017
  • October 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • October 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013

Categories

  • Awards
  • Conferences
  • Events
  • Graduate Seminars
  • Interviews
  • Lectures
  • Publications
  • Teaching
  • Travel
  • Uncategorized
  • Undergraduate Courses

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Calendar

February 2023
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728  
« Apr    

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Joseph M. Conte
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Joseph M. Conte
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...