The differences between movies and literature as modes of storytelling are perhaps most clear in film adaptations of literary texts. While avoiding, or at least being conscious of the interpretive limitations of, the blanket judgments that are typically made about film adaptations ("the movie was horrible because it didn't match my sense of what the book should look and sound like"), we will investigate-and compare-how readers and audiences make meaning out of literature's reliance on words and film's capacity to utilize seemingly more expansive vocabularies (images, words, and sounds more generally). If, as film and literature scholars insist, changes-sometimes significant ones-are inevitable when stories move from the page to the screen, what are the specific thematic and ideological implications of such alterations when Afro-American-authored stories are distributed by television and movie studios? We will be examining, among other pairs of narratives, Beloved, The Color Purple, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Requirements: pre-class e-mail responses to readings, two short papers, and one longer paper. Prerequisite: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limited to 25. (Post-1900)

Hour: AWKWARD