Fiction on Film

Fiction on Film. Novel and Drama on Screen / Film et littérature : roman et théâtre au cinéma Film et littérature : roman et théâtre au cinéma

The seminar will be devoted to a study of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and its
adaptation for the screen.
McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road chronicles the journey of two survivors, a man and his son. Equipped with a map in tatters whose fragments they have numbered, they are making their way to the ocean. The narrative of their meaningless survival from day to day revisits some of the tropes of the journey West turned into a flight to the East, in which the different places can be read allegorically. The abandoned house triggers a reflection on the meaning of the home; the supermarket stands as a vestige of a consumer society without consumers, where the most ordinary items have become unknown to the child and where our world only exists as scattered fragments of the past.
In his 2009 eponymous movie, Australian director John Hillcoat adapts for the screen Cormac McCarthy’s legendary postapocalyptic novel The Road with English-Australian playwright and screenwriter, Joe Penhall, best known for having adapted Ian McEwan's novel Enduring Love to film in 2004 and created the Netflix original series
Mindhunter (2017-19) on the birth of the FBI profilers unit. Among other stars, Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee play a father and his son desperately trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The film received positive reviews and garnered some prizes, among which a BAFTA nomination for Best Cinematography.
In this dismal tale of near-extinction, the road functions as a metaphor for the disappearance of community and the emergence of a bleak form of nomadism. But uncharacteristically, it doesn’t offer “the Man” (Mortensen) and “the Boy” (Smit-McPhee) any form of hope nor lead to any display of conventional masculine heroism. The pair’s
progress among the ruins of civilization is some anti-Frontier-like itinerary inscribing on screen the
result of Man’s ultimate estrangement from Nature.
We’ll also focus on film terminology, interpretation of camera movements, use of lighting, and generic hybridity with incursions into drama and horror – among other categories.

- Se familiariser avec les œuvres, courants et enjeux majeurs de l’adaptation de pièce et roman à l’écran ainsi que des modes de représentation de la violence et de l’horreur dans le cinéma américano-britannique contemporain : savoir décrypter les modes de transfert d’un médium à un autre.

- Renforcer les outils de l’analyse du texte de théâtre, de roman et de film, tant dans une visée généraliste (être
capable de décrypter un texte ainsi que l’image animée, d’en comprendre les codes sémiologiques et iconographiques et les usages, pouvoir en proposer une discussion en anglais), que dans l’optique de la préparation aux concours de l’enseignement

SESSION 1

Contrôle Continu : A/ Partiel : 50% & B/ Exposé : 40% & C/ Participation : 10% = 100%

Examen : Ecrit de 3h, 100%

SESSION 2 : Examen : Ecrit de 3h, 100%

Anglais C1 & plus ainsi qu'une bonne maîtrise du français.

Bonne maîtrise de l'analyse littéraire comme filmique et donc également du vocabulaire littéraire et filmique dans les deux langues, des grands mouvements et périodes et des genres / catégories génériques.

 
A good mastery of the commentary of literary texts and films in English and French, and of the related technical vocabulary, as well as the great movements / periods and generic categories

Selected Bibliography (to be completed in class)abulaire 

Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI Publishing, 1999. 
Berger, James. “Twentieth-century Apocalypse: Forecasts and Aftermaths”, Twentieth Century Literature, Winter 2000, Vo. 46, N° 4, Literature and Apocalypse: 387-395.
Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York & London: Routledge, 1990.
DiTommaso, Lorenzo. “Apocalypticism and Popular Culture.” The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature. John J. Collins, Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014: 473-510.
Fisher, Mark. “Post‐Apocalypse Now », Architectural Design, “Post-traumatic Urbanism”, Vol.  80, Issue 5, Sept.-Oct. 2010: 70–73.
           “The Lonely Road”, Film Quarterly 63:3 (2010): 14-17
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. U. of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis & London, 2013.
Richardson, Michael. “Climate Trauma, of the Affects of the Catastrophe to Come”, Environmental Humanities 10:1 (May 2018): 1-19.
Schatz, Thomas. Old Hollywood/New Hollywood: Ritual, Art, and Industry, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1993.
Stratton, Billy. “‘Everything depends on reaching the coast’: Inscriptions of Placelessness in John Hillcoat’s Adaptation of The Road”. Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 70, Nb 4, Winter 2014: 85-107. 
Wielenberg, Erik. “God, Morality and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” The Cormac
McCarthy Journal 8:1 (2010); 1-19.

Roman et film facilement disponibles en librairie, en ligne, y compris sur diverses plateformes et déjà en rayon à la BU