LMKB422 The Three Ages of Adaptation

Faculty of Arts
Spring 2018
Extent and Intensity
0/2/0. 2 credit(s). Type of Completion: z (credit).
Teacher(s)
prof. Thomas Leitch (lecturer), doc. Mgr. Petr Bubeníček, Ph.D. (deputy)
doc. Mgr. Petr Bubeníček, Ph.D. (alternate examiner)
Guaranteed by
doc. PhDr. Zbyněk Fišer, Ph.D.
Department of Czech Literature – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Mgr. Eva Zachová
Supplier department: Department of Czech Literature – Faculty of Arts
Timetable
Wed 9. 5. 9:10–12:25 A31, Thu 10. 5. 9:10–12:25 A31, Fri 11. 5. 9:10–12:25 B2.33
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 25 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 1/25, only registered: 0/25, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 0/25
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
Course objectives
he Three Ages of Adaptation Because most of the scholarship on adaptation continues to focus on the relationship between films and their literary sources, it is tempting to think of the twentieth century, the period of cinema’s dominance as the most important art form, as the golden age of adaptation. Without dissenting from this characterization, this course attempts to contextualize film adaptation more comprehensively by considering both the long period before the rise of cinematic adaptation and the much briefer period during which cinema has become largely superseded by other media. The first session will review the age before adaptation as we commonly think of it, the age when the copying of so many art forms was so common that it would have been pointless to divide new artworks into adapted and original works. This session will focus especially on nineteenth-century Europe, where social, legal, and technological developments paved the way for our modern notion of adaptation to emerge. The second session will survey the history of film adaptation from its beginnings in 1899 through the end of the twentieth century and the corresponding history of adaptation studies, which arose as scholars grappled with the representational and expressive opportunities the new medium offered, its challenges to long-established aesthetic assumptions about narrative, visual, and musical art, and its invitation to rethink these assumptions in more inclusive terms. The third session will take off from Henry Jenkins’s widely influential notion of a convergence culture in which the storyworlds of franchises like The Matrix and the Marvel Universe are increasingly rooted in multiple media platforms. It will analyze the ways in which convergence culture is a logical development of the adaptation culture of the twentieth century, the ways in which it marks a crucial series of departures, and the ways in which it marks the closing chapter in the adaptation age. The course will conclude by considering the status of adaptation studies in a post-adaptation world.
Assessment methods
oral colloquium
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
The course is taught only once.
Information on the extent and intensity of the course: 0.
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