Media, Culture and Society – Screening the Gothic: Adaptations of Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, and Dracula (M.Ed. M 11.1 oder 11.2) Kurs 2 - Einzelansicht

In this seminar, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of the defining elements of Gothic fiction in the Victorian era, including its themes, motifs, and historical context. Discussing the artistic and technical challenges involved in adapting Gothic literature for the screen, you will develop a working theory of adaptation which includes the translation of narrative, mood, and setting, as well as the relationships between texts, such as dialogism and intertextuality. Furthermore, you will engage with basic and complex problems in adaptation theory, particularly the role of ‘fidelity’, “poetic licence’, chronology and medium. You will investigate how adaptations negotiate cultural narratives and identities. By the end of this course, you will be able to assess how post-structural theory enriches and expands the field of adaptation studies.

“The film wasn’t as good as the book” is one of the most frequently heard verdicts when discussing the adaptation of a work of literature for the screen, implying that ‘fidelity’ to the ‘original’ is the decisive, if not the only, criterion for its success. Such statements also suggest that there is some mysterious ‘spirit’ or ‘essence’ of the original that needs to be transformed to a different medium, doomed to be inferior to the untouchable status of the canonical literary work. Recent studies in adaptation, however, take a more expansive approach, with not one text as their vantage point, but at least two: source text and adaptation in dialogue with one another.

We are going to focus on the examples of three of the most frequently adapted classics of Gothic fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), texts known to a broad audience especially through their afterlives in plays, films, television, graphic novels, and horror merchandising.

Based on our collaborative reading of the source texts, we are going to perform a comparative analysis between the source texts and their multiple adaptations. Drawing on post-structural theory, this seminar will explore the intertextual relationships in adaptations and analyse how adaptation interacts with cultural, economic, and historical forces, considering factors such the film industry, audience expectation, technological advancement, political ideologies, legal conditions, and censorship.

Literatur

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818 text)

Stoker, Bram. Dracula

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

For each of the primary texts, the Norton Critical Edition is recommended due to its abundance of critical materials, including the topic of adaptation.

Films

Individual scenes of the films listed below will be shown and discussed in class. You are, however, encouraged to watch as many of these films in their entirety as possible.

Whale, James (dir.). Frankenstein (1931)

Mamoulian, Rouben (dir.). Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931)

Browning, Todd (dir.). Dracula (1931)

Brooks, Mel (dir.). Young Frankenstein (1974)

Dragoti, Stan. Love at First Bite (1978)

Branagh, Kenneth (dir.). Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

Frears, Stephen (dir.). Mary Reilly (1996)

Lussier (dir.), Patrick. Dracula 2000 (2000, German title: Wes Craven präsentiert Dracula)

Pilot episode to BBC series Jekyll (2007)

Shore, Gary. Dracula Untold (2014)

Recommended Reading:

Groom, Nick. The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2012.

Leitch, Thomas. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Oxford UP, 2020.

Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media. Levington, 2019.

Wright, Angela, Dale Townshend and Catherine Spooner (eds.). The Cambridge History of the Gothic. 3 vols. Cambridge University Press, 2020