A Companion to Literature and Film

A Companion to Literature in Film provides state-of-the-art research on world literature, film, and the complex theoretical relationship between them. 25 essays by international experts cover the most important topics in the study of literature and film adaptations.

• Covers a wide variety of topics, including cultural, thematic, theoretical, and genre issues
• Discusses film adaptations from the birth of cinema to the present day
• Explores a diverse range of titles and genres, including film noir, biblical epics, and Italian and Chinese cinema

List of Illustrations viii

Notes on Contributors ix

Preface xiv

Acknowledgments xvi

1 Novels, Films, and the Word/Image Wars 1
Kamilla Elliott

2 Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies of Adaptation 23
Ella Shohat

3 Gospel Truth? From Cecil B. DeMille to Nicholas Ray 46
Pamela Grace

4 Transécriture and Narrative Mediatics: The Stakes of Intermediality 58
André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion

5 The Look: From Film to Novel. An Essay in Comparative Narratology 71
François Jost

6 Adaptation and Mis-adaptations: Film, Literature, and Social Discourses 81
Francesco Casetti

7 The Invisible Novelty: Film Adaptations in the 1910s 92
Yuri Tsivian

8 Italy and America: Pinocchio’s First Cinematic Trip 112
Raffaele De Berti

9 The Intertextuality of Early Cinema: A Prologue to Fantômas 127
Tom Gunning

10 Cosmopolitan Projections: World Literature on Chinese Screens 144
Zhang Zhen

11 The Rhetoric of Interruption 164
Allen S. Weiss

12 Visualizing the Voice: Joyce, Cinema, and the Politics of Vision 171
Luke Gibbons

13 Adapting Cinema to History: A Revolution in the Making 189
Dudley Andrew

14 Photographic Verismo, Cinematic Adaptation, and the Staging of a Neorealist Landscape 205
Noa Steimatsky

15 The Devil’s Parody: Horace McCoy’s Appropriation and Refiguration of Two Hollywood Musicals 229
Charles Musser

16 The Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies: The Example of Film Noir 258
R. Barton Palmer

17 Adapting Farewell, My Lovely 278
William Luhr

18 Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock 298
Richard Allen

19 Running Time: The Chronotope of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner 326
Peter Hitchcock

20 From Libertinage to Eric Rohmer: Transcending “Adaptation” 343
Maria Tortajada

21 The Moment of Portraiture: Scorsese Reads Wharton 358
Brigitte Peucker

22 The Talented Poststructuralist: Hetero-masculinity, Gay Artifice, and Class Passing 368
Chris Straayer

23 From Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” 385
Margaret Montalbano

24 The Bible as Cultural Object(s) in Cinema 399
Gavriel Moses

25 All’s Wells that Ends Wells: Apocalypse and Empire in The War of the Worlds 423
Julian Cornell

Index 448

“This volume stands as a model for consolidating studies of film and literature. It demonstrates that this field of intellectual inquiry, as it has developed over the last 15 years, encompasses the highbrow and the low; first and third world subject matter; issues of audience as well as authorship; and a commitment to interdisciplinarity. This collection will be useful for all kinds of readers: scholars, undergraduates, and all those who take seriously the pleasures provided by movies and novels.”
Eric Smoodin, University of California at Davis

“To anyone believing the discussion of novel-into-film had been exhausted a generation ago, A Companion to Literature and Film will come as a welcome surprise. Each of the twenty-five brilliantly argued case studies shows a level of conceptual clarity and interdisciplinary range that is astonishing. Scholars will find that this book bristles with ideas, while newcomers to the debates have an indispensable and expert guide.”
Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam

Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University. His many books include Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (with Ella Shohat, 1994), and Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (1989). With Toby Miller, he is the editor of Film and Theory (Blackwell, 2000) and The Blackwell Companion to Film Theory (2000).

Alessandra Raengo is finishing her PhD in the Cinema Studies Department at New York University, where she occasionally teaches. Her dissertation explores race and vernacular social criticism in American culture between 1945 and 1968. Among her publications are The Birth of Film Genres (1999) and The Bounds of Representation (2000), both multilingual volumes edited with Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi.

A Companion to Literature and Film provides state-of-the-art research on world literature, film, and the complex theoretical relationship between them. Twenty-five essays by international experts cover the most important topics in the study of literature and film adaptations.

Contributors explore, in a highly innovative and groundbreaking way, important topics in the field. These include:

• Key issues such as dialogism, hidden intertextuality, and adaptation as readings, critiques, and rewritings of source novels
• Cultural concerns including iconophobia and the word/image wars
• Theoretical issues such as “transécriture” and “intermediality”
• Genre topics including “hagiopic” and the apocalyptic film
• The relationship with other media, including photography and painting
• Consideration of format, including seriality, and diverse source material
• Thematic subjects such as hetero-masculinity in The Talented Mr Ripley and libertinage in the work of Eric Rohmer.

The combination of theory and sophisticated readings of novels and adaptations adds up to a tour de force that reshapes and reconfigures the very field of literature and film studies.