Author: Carmen Pérez Ríu
Peer-Reviewers: Kathryn McClain and James Fleury
Website Developer: Kristen Figgins

Syllabus Overview

“Literatures in English and Film” is a 6-credit (ECTS) course offered at the University of Oviedo in Spain. This introductory module is designed for second-year students of our English Studies degree program. While these students are simultaneously enrolled in other literature courses, they generally lack formal training in media studies from their secondary or previous tertiary education. Therefore, the course aims to provide learners with a foundational understanding of film and media texts and of the analytical tools needed to examine them comparatively as adaptations. It focuses on films based on literary works written originally in English, aligning with the linguistic and cultural emphasis of the degree program.

The first units of the syllabus are devoted to introducing the main tenets of adaptation studies, contributing to an approach that discards views of the phenomenon in terms of fidelity and elaborates on a more nuanced appreciation of its complexity. This is based on a concept of adaptation which departs from Linda Hutcheon’s defining conceptualization around three main ideas: a) that adaptations are “palimpsestous,” texts in the Barthesian sense, that is “a plural stereophony of echoes, citations, references;” b) that they can be studied “as adaptations, “repetition without replication,” and c) that their analysis can be approached in terms of both the process and the product of creation and also of the relations between both media as perceived at the moment of reception (Hutcheon, 2006, 6-8).  

The contents also aim to develop students’ general film analysis skills, as well as narratological and semiotic perspectives based on the comparative study of the source texts and their adaptations. As the course progresses, other related aspects are introduced, such as the contrast between film mise-en-scéne and theatrical staging, the impact of film genres and their characteristics on the product of adaptation, and the influence of other literary and film texts, as well as other media, as intertexts in films. Finally, the course introduces the concept of Intermediality to enhance students’ awareness of the breadth and potential of adaptation as a recurring phenomenon in contemporary globalized media networks.

The course, thus, aims to develop and widen students’ general understanding of narrative strategies at the intersection of media, within the framework of adaptation studies, as part of the milieu of intermedial influences and Transmedia Storytelling in contemporary cultural and entertainment industries. This will contribute to enhancing their critical skills, understanding criticism as the practice of evaluating and interpreting texts – literary works and films in our case – as cultural products from a variety of theoretical perspectives. These can include the study of narrative structures, visual aesthetics, and ideological content from standpoints including not only semiotics and narratology but also feminist and multicultural approaches. The literature/film framework of comparative analysis will serve as a context in which to present the complexity of current narrative text production, encouraging students to explore how storytelling transcends different media.

Author Bio

Carmen Pérez Ríu (Orcid n. 0000-0002-7822-3242) is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Oviedo (Spain). She specializes in literary and film criticism, and particularly in film adaptation studies, both of which she approaches from a gender perspective. She has published a monograph on representations of women in film adaptations of neo-Victorian novels (Universidad de Oviedo, 2000), as well as contributions in collective works on literature and film and academic journals including Continuum, Literature/Film Quarterly, Brontë Studies, Adaptation, Arbor, and Atlantis (the journal of the Spanish Society of Anglo-American Studies). Her research interests also include feminist film and media studies in general, and she teaches in the Master’s Degree in Gender and Diversity of the University of Oviedo (Erasmus Mundus). She is currently Coordinator of the undergraduate degree in English Studies of the University of Oviedo. For fourteen years she has been in charge of the module Las literaturas en lengua inglesa y el cine (i.e. Literatures in English and Film). She is a member of the Association of Adaptation Studies and of the Spanish Society of Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN).

About the Adaptation Today Pedagogy Series

Adaptation Today is a free, accessible resource for all academics and students who are interested in adaptation, especially graduate students, contingent scholars, and early career researchers. The pedagogy series creates a space of community and resource-sharing, with rolling deadlines for submission. See our CFP page to see how you can submit your own syllabi, lesson plans, assessments, and blog posts for publication.