From Book to Screen: Literature and Film

July 19, 2008

In classrooms today, English teachers often turn to film as a way to open up books to their students. Yet as any one who has seen a film version of Anna Karenina knows, a great book does not always make a great film. We’ve invited three professors of literature at UNC to talk about the relationship between books and film and the manner in which books can be transformed on screen. We’ll also view films with our speakers and talk about the books and films they use in their teaching.

Our first speaker, Inger Brodey, will look at the works of Jane Austen, and the numerous films made based on Jane Austen’s novels.  These Austen-based films have been set in places as remote from Austen’s English countryside as the Indian subcontinent and have included characters as foreign to Austen’s world as California teenagers, New York debutantes, and runaways in Florida.  This talk will focus on specific examples of these films and address such questions as: What tends to be gained and lost in these transpositions of Austen’s novels across time and culture?  What aspects of Austen’s novels remain untranslatable into film? What is the secret of Austen’s appeal to film audiences today?

Certain works of American literature have posed particular challenges for filmmakers. How, for instance, is one to recast Nathaniel Hawthorne's timeless meditation on sin as a visual narrative? Or expand Washington Irving's charming folktale "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" into a feature-length film? Or translate Jefferson's inspiring prose in the Declaration into a musical comedy? Jane Thrailkill looks at film adaptations of American classics to discuss the light (and the shadow) they cast on the original, and what they tell us about the values we hold now.

Our final speaker, Gregory Flaxman, will look to our national genre, the western. He will examine the literary constituents of this genre, as well as the manner in which both novels and their cinematic adaptations invented an imaginary geography (or “mythography”) of America. Beginning with Owen Wister's The Virginian, arguably the first western, Professor Flaxman will consider how this genre emerges at the very moment when the frontier itself is declared dead -- in other words, how the fiction of the west replaces the actual territory.  

Topics and Speakers

Global Jane Austen: Film, Fiction, and Fantasy
Inger S. Brodey, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Asian Studies

"A" is for Adaptation: Projecting Classic American Writing onto the Screen
Jane Thrailkill, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

The Myth of the West and the Mythography of the Western
Gregory Flaxman, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Communication Studies

From the Printed Page to the Silver Screen: Approaching Literature Through Film
Professors Brodey, Thrailkill, and Flaxman

Time and Cost

9:15 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Saturday, July 19, 2008. The tuition is $120.00 ($105.00 by May 28). The optional lunch is $15. Scholarship tuition for teachers is $60 ($52.50 by May 28). 10 contact hours for 1 unit of renewal credit.

For information about lodging click here.

Co-Sponsored by the General Alumni Association.
For information about GAA discounts and other scholarships available to Humanities Program participants, click here.

Register for this seminar.