COURSE DESCRIPTION
There is a long history of adapting novels into film and the reasons vary from the desire to bring literature to the masses and elevate cinema's cultural position, the fulfillment of the Hollywood studio pipeline (screenwriters, script girls, and technicians), and the desire of film auteurs to shed new insights into society through the use of the film medium. These social, industrial, and intellectual needs have shaped much of the debate concerning film adaptations. More importantly however is the philosophical polemic such an endeavor continues to posit. What is poetics? Do we get different meaning from novels than we get from films? Do we perceive each medium differently, which then affects our understanding? Do means of expression therefore express different things or do film and literature express an ideal form (Plato) that transcends their materiality? How does film form embody the thought and feeling of the "concretized form" of the novel?

We will take a comparative approach by looking at the poetics of films and literature from different countries: US, France, Japan, Egypt, France, and Mexico. For example, what is the process in which a Mexican filmmaker, Artur Rupstein, and a Cairene filmmaker, Salah Abu-Seif, translate/transform the same novel by Nagib Mahfouz in film? What are the specific elements in their respective cultures (one Christian, the other Islamic) that influence their decisions to add or subtract from Mahfouz, translate light into shadow or first person into voice over? In this seminar we will study these questions among others by looking at films and their corresponding literatures in the US, Europe, Japan, and the Third World. For example, we will look at Murnau's Faust , Welles' Falstaff , Bresson's The Gentle Woman , and Abu-Seif's The Beginning and the End as well as the version directed by Mexican filmmaker Arturo Rupstein, and read Goethe, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Mahfouz, and selected essays, scripts, and interviews.The course also examines how film and literature differ across cultures in forging the consciousness of a people. Mahfouz's novels and films attempt to forge a national culture in Egypt that is quite different from its role in the Mexican context. How do notions of Arabness, for instance, develop in contrast to notions of Mexican identity, just before and after the Free Officers revolt in Egypt and the different dictatorships in Mexico? Finally, we will look closely at how the notion of poetics has been defined in the West and its function is creating a view of culture that arises out of differences and conflict: the c ultured vs. the non-cultured, the civilized vs. the barbaric, the progressive vs. the backwards, and the rational vs. the irrational, that could imply that other places outside the West have been lacking in culture which has lead to colonialism, for instance. How does the East on the other hand understand and create culture outside the sphere of colonialism?

COURSE OBJECTIVES
The different readings and viewing are meant to give the student a rigorous understanding of how narrative is built in film and literature and the ensuing poetics. Our goals here would be to:

COURSE REQUIREMENTS & GRADING

REQUIRED READING (available at the U bookstore and reserved at Wilson Library)

• Goethe, FAUST, (Anchor, 1962)
• Shakespeare, OTHELLO, The Arden Edition
• Najib Mahfouz, THE BEGINNING AND THE END, (Anchor, 1989)
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, THE BEST SHORT STORIES BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (Modern Library; Modern Lib edition, 2001)
• Kaj Munk, FIVE PLAYS (American Scandinavian Foundation, 1953) -- class handout
• Aristotle, POETICS (Hackett Pub Co Inc., 1987)
• Robert Bresson, NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPHER (Green Integer, 1997)
• Erich Auerbach, MIMESIS: THE REPRESENTATION OF REALITY IN WESTERN LITERATURE (Princeton University Press, 2003) -- class handout
• Northrop Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM: FOUR ESSAYS (Princeton University Press; Updated edition, 2000) -- class handout

RECOMMENDED READING

• Horace, THE ART OF POETRY, (Kessinger Publishing, 2003)
• Seymour Chatman, STORY AND DISCOURSE (Cornell University Press, 1980)
• Eiji Yoshikawa, TAIKO (Kodansha International, 2000)
• Grigori Kozintsev, KING LEAR: THE SPACE OF TRAGEDY (University of California Press, 1977)
• Alan Spiegel, FICTION AND THE CAMERA EYE (University Press of Virginia, 1976)
• Shakespeare, KING LEAR, The Arden Edition

Introduction to the course and concepts

Readings:
Poetics, Aritotle (pp.1-42)
Mimesis, Erich Auerbach (Odysseus's Scar , pp. 3-23)

WEEK 2
September 13 & 15

Readings:
Faust, Goethe (pp. 93-209 -- pages are in German and English so you are reading half the assigned pages)
Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye (Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes, pp. 33-67)

Screenings:
FAUST (F.W. Murnau, 116 minutes, 1926)

WEEK 3
September 20 & 22

Readings:
Faust, Goethe (pp. 209-421)
Mimesis, Erich Auerbach (Miller the Musician, pp. 434-453)

Screenings:
FAUST (Jan Svankmajer, 1994)

WEEK 4
September 27 & 29

Readings:
Othello, William Shakespeare (pp. 113-204)
Mimesis, Erich Auerbach (The Weary Prince, pp. 312-333)
Interviews with Orson Welles (class handouts)

Screenings:
OTHELLO (Orson Welles, 93 minutes, 1952)

WEEK 5
October 4 & 6

Readings:
Othello, William Shakespeare (pp. 205-332)

Screenings:
FILMING OTHELLO

WEEK 6
October 11 & 13

Readings:
The Beginning and the End, Nagib Mahfouz (pp. 13-123)

Screenings:
THE BEGINNING AND THE END (Salah Abouseif, 130 minutes, 1960) -- part 1

WEEK 7
October 18 & 20

Readings:
The Beginning and the End, Nagib Mahfouz (pp. 124-208)
Cruelty of Memory, Edward Said, Al-Ahram Weekly Online,13 - 19 December 2001, Issue No.564 (http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/2sc1.htm)
The Legacy of Salah Abu Seif, Master of Realism in Egyptian Cinema, Ibrahim Al Aris, Aljadid, Vol. 3, No. 15, February 1997 (http://www.aljadid.com/film/0315aris.html)

Screenings:
THE BEGINNING AND THE END (Salah Abouseif, 130 minutes, 1960) -- part 2
THE BEGINNING AND THE END (Arturo Ripstein, 188 minutes, 1993) -- part 1

WEEK 8
October 25 & 27

Readings:
The Beginning and the End, Nagib Mahfouz (pp. 209-310)

Screenings:
THE BEGINNING AND THE END (Arturo Ripstein, 188 minutes, 1993) -- part 2

WEEK 9
November 1 & 3

Readings:
The Beginning and the End, Nagib Mahfouz (pp. 311-412)

MID-TERM EXAM (in class)

WEEK 10
November 9 & 10

Readings:
Ordet, Kaj Munk
Selections from Dreyer in Double Reflection (class handouts)

Screenings:
ORDET (Carl Theodore Dreyer , 126 minutes, 1955)

WEEK 11
November 15 & 17

Readings:
Ordet, Kaj Munk

Screenings:
Selections from ORDET (Carl Theodore Dreyer , 126 minutes, 1955)

WEEK 12
Novermber 22

Readings:
Notes on the Cinematographe, Robert Bresson
Encountering Directors, Charles Thomas Samuels (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1972) http://www.mastersofcinema.org/bresson/Words/CTSamuels.html

Novermber 24

NO CLASS -- THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY

WEEK 13
November 30 & December 1

Readings:
A Gentle Creature, Fyodor Dostoevsky (pp. 215 - 262)

Screenings:
A GENTLE CREATURE (Robert Bresson, 88 minutes, 1969)

WEEK 14
December 6 & 8

Readings:
Selections from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment & The Idiot (class handout)

Screenings:
AU HASARD, BALTHAZAR (Robert Bresson, 95 minutes, 1966)

WEEK 15
December 13 & 15

Readings:
TBA

Screenings:
47 RONIN (Kenji Mizoguchi, 241 minutes, 1941) -- Part 1

WEEK 16
December 19

Final paper is due