Adaptation Theory Criticism And Pedagogy

Book of Abstracts from the Adaptation: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy conference held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, Croatia, Feb. 23-25, 2017

From All Quiet on the Western Front and Gone with the Wind to No Country for Old Men and Slumdog Millionaire, many of the most memorable films have been adapted from other sources. And while courses on film studies are taught throughout the world, The Pedagogy of Adaptation makes a strong case for treating adaptation studies as a separate discipline. What makes this book unique is its claim that adaptation is above all a creative process and not simply a slavish imitation or reproduction of an 'original.' This collection of essays focuses on numerous contexts to emphasize why adaptations matter to students of literature. It is the first such volume devoted exclusively to teaching adaptations from a practical, teacher-centered angle. Many of the essays show how 'adaptation' as a discipline can be used to prompt reflection on cultural, historical, and political differences. Written by specialists in a variety of fields, ranging from film, radio, theater, and even language studies, the book adopts a pluralistic view of adaptation, showing how its processes vary across different contexts and in different disciplines. Defining new horizons for the teaching of adaptation studies, these essays draw on such disparate sources as Frankenstein, Moby Dick, and South Park. This volume not only provides a resource-book of lesson plans but offers valuable pointers as to why teaching literature and film can help develop students' skills and improve their literacy.

Teaching Adaptations addresses the challenges and appeal of teaching popular fiction and culture, video games and new media content, which serve to enrich the curriculum, as well as exploit the changing methods by which English students read and consume literary and screen texts.

Literary style is something many people talk about, but few could define. Yet it is crucial for our response to narrative art. Style can facilitate or obscure the events of a story or the motivations of a character, enhance the aesthetic appeal of a narrative or complicate its emotional impact, and even inflect the political or ethical implications of a work. It is precisely this complex operation of style that Patrick Colm Hogan explains in Style in Narrative. Drawing on recent psychological research, this book proposes a new and clear definition of style and provides a systematic theoretical account of style in relation to cognitive and affective science. Hogan's definition stresses that style varies by both scope, or the range of text or texts that may share a style, and level, the components of an individual work that might involve a shared style. The book uses rich examples from literature, film, and graphic fiction, including analysis of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Shakespeare's canon, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Art Spiegelman's Maus, as well as visual analysis of films by Robert Rodriguez, Deepa Mehta, Eric Rohmer, M.F.Husain, Yasujiro Ozu, and Chuan Lu. Through these studies Hogan identifies stylistic concerns common across mediums as well as the most consequential stylistic differences between them. Bringing together three often separated mediums within a coherent framework, Style in Narrative makes an important contribution to and necessary intervention in the field of stylistics.

Traditional critics of film adaptation generally assumed a) that the written text is better than the film adaptation because the plot is more intricate and the language richer when pictorial images do not intrude; b) that films are better when particularly faithful to the original; c) that authors do not make good script writers and should not sully their imagination by writing film scripts; d) and often that American films lack the complexity of authored texts because they are sourced out of Hollywood. The 'faithfulness' view has by and large disappeared, and intertextuality is now a generally received notion, but the field still lacks studies with a postmodern methodology and lens.Exploring Hollywood feature films as well as small studio productions, Adaptation Theory and Criticism explores the intertextuality of a dozen films through a series of case studies introduced through discussions of postmodern methodology and practice. Providing the reader with informative background on theories of film adaptation as well as carefully articulated postmodern methodology and issues, Gordon Slethaug includes several case studies of major Hollywood productions and small studio films, some of which have been discussed before (Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, and Do the Right Thing) and some that have received lesser consideration (Six Degrees of Separation, Smoke, Smoke Signals, Broken Flowers, and various Snow White narratives including Enchanted, Mirror Mirror, and Snow White and the Huntsman). Useful for both film and literary studies students, Adaptation Theory and Criticism cogently combines the existing scholarship and uses previous theories to engage readers to think about the current state of American literature and film.

Curriculum has become the new wonder word for our times. Even more, curriculum has become a concept, and an idea. This book provides a speculum mentis, a map of the mind, of modern curriculum theory to help trace the interactions between various forms of thought as they play out in contemporary schooling. This book is also about how the weaving of various forms of thought provides an umbrella of understanding about the nature of curriculum and perhaps a glimpse of human understanding. One of the presuppositions of this book is that there are often, and perhaps almost always, multiple strands of ideas at work simultaneously. In the modern world when they come together they form a coherent set of theories which can be called a paradigm. In the de-centered world that this book suggests the history of ideas then might be best described as being a bit like our own mind. We often have divergent opinions about who we are, what we want to do and so on. One of the central concepts in contemporary education, reflection, is an attempt to help us override that tendency, to become more pragmatic by focusing and getting on with the job. This might work in the world of formal education where one can coerce students to be more goal oriented for short periods of time by testing them, but in reality that doesn’t happen to most of us a lot of the time. To illustrate this point strands such as the development of theoretical physics in the early part of the twentieth century, a discussion of the part which philosophical thinking plays in the development of curriculum, particularly in a post modern sense, a recasting of narrative knowledge and a focus on mavericks learners, are discussed. To live in this modern- post modern world requires reflective thought about the question of what form connectedness will take. In this case the small narratives of the thinkers who have experienced the tension between the modern and post modern world as they variously grappled with their inabilities to construct a unified theory are examined. It is suggested that this failure is a primary illustration of the grand narratives initial collapse. Further, it is suggested that the smaller stories of men and women working to paper over the cracks in the proceeding decades represent the foundations of a metaphor for the human condition as it in fact is not as it has been constructed. Bryant Griffith is currently a Professor in the College of Education at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi. He has also been on the faculty of the University of Calgary in Canada and has taught in various public school settings. Dr Griffith has published widely in the areas of curriculum theory and the philosophy of education.

With more than 300 entries, these two volumes provide a one-stop source for a comprehensive overview of communication theory, offering current descriptions of theories as well as the background issues and concepts that comprise these theories. This is the first resource to summarize, in one place, the diversity of theory in the communication field. Key Themes Applications and Contexts Critical Orientations Cultural Orientations Cybernetic and Systems Orientations Feminist Orientations Group and Organizational Concepts Information, Media, and Communication Technology International and Global Concepts Interpersonal Concepts Non-Western Orientations Paradigms, Traditions, and Schools Philosophical Orientations Psycho-Cognitive Orientations Rhetorical Orientations Semiotic, Linguistic, and Discursive Orientations Social/Interactional Orientations Theory, Metatheory, Methodology, and Inquiry