This will be a wide-ranging course that addresses three distinct but related critical problems in the contemporary understanding of film and fiction. The most general is the question of how we might go about linking the practice of criticism in the literary arts with that of the screen arts. Where are the common issues of structure, form, narration, point of view management, and the like? Where, on the other hand, are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain—the problem that some have labeled “medium specificity” in the arts? The second problem has to do more specifically with questions of adaptation. Adaptation is a fact of our cultural experience that we encounter in many circumstances, but perhaps in non more insistently as when we witness the reproduction of a literary narrative in cinematic or televisual form? Adaptation theory has taught us to look beyond the narrow criterion of “fidelity” a far too limiting in scope? But when we look beyond, what do we look for, and what other concepts guide our exploration? The third and final problem has to do with the now rampant genre of the “film based on fact,” especially when the facts derive from a particular source text, as in the recent case of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman? What has this genre become so popular? What are its particular genre markings (e.g., excessive stylization, the use of documentary footage of the actual persons and events involved)? What might its emergence have to do with the perceived crisis in the authority of reported facts in our time? There will screenings of adaptations and readings in the prose fiction on which they are based, both older (e.g., Austen, Shelley, and Dickens) and more recent (e.g., Ishuguro and Baldwin) as well as readings in both literary and film criticism. Possibilities for the films-based-on-fact that we might screen would include: American Hustle, Fruitvale Station, I Tanya, and BlacKkKlansman. Students enrolled in the course will be expected to complete a short written exercise at midterm (3-4 pp.) and a longer course paper (12pp.). (Fiction, Theory)