Elective

CLIT7028 Adaptation and Remakes Across Cultures

The course introduces the aesthetic and ideological dynamics in film remakes across different genres, media, and cultures. Starting with readings from classic studies and theorizations of film and literature, students will explore the complexity of creativity in film remakes to appreciate the nuanced originality in the transference of one medium to another, be it from page to screen or from screen to screen, which go beyond fidelity. Students will examine the differences in such seemingly identical repetitions that reveal the paradoxical tension in the transference of ideas from one culture to another in the increasingly divided globalized world. Students will critique a wide spectrum of film remakes to reveal what is spatial-temporally particular in the universal human condition. The selection of film remakes spans across diverse genres and cultures to reveal the aesthetic in the ideological, and the ideological in the aesthetic. Students will also discover that film remakes are not only a unidirectional transference from one film to another. Film remakes are also discursive on a grander scale of transnational allusion and translation of genre elements, the conjuring of which have come to define the careers of many auteurs. Students will engage in discussion, write short in-class response paper, give group presentation, and complete a semester-end paper on a selected set of film remakes.

Assessment: 100% coursework