Much of the early writing on cinema was produced by literary figures. Here is the Russian novelist Maxim Gorky responding to an 1896 screening of a film: Students on LLC MSc programmes get first priority to this course. If you are not on an LLC course, please let your administrator or the course administrator know you are interested in the course. Unauthorised enrolments will be removed. Film theory also inherits antecedent questions concerning artistic realism. An uncommonly contested and elastic term, realism comes to film theory heavily laden with millennial encrustations from antecedent debates in philosophy and literature. Classical philosophy distinguished between Platonic realism – the assertion of the absolute and objective existence of universals, i.e. the belief that forms, essences, abstractions such as beauty and truth exist independent of human perception – and Aristotelian realism – the view that universals only exist within objects in the external world (rather than in an extra-material realm of essences). The term realism is confusing because these early philosophical usages often seem diametrically opposed to common-sense realism – the belief in the objective existence of facts and the attempt to see these facts without idealization. A thorough, well-annotated collection of important essays in both film and media theory. Perhaps the most up-to-date and relevant of the large, inclusive anthologies.

Adams, Parveen 1996. The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences. London: Routledge. Here the notion of photogenie, later developed by French filmmaker-theorists like Jean Epstein to advance the specific potentialities of the seventh art, becomes a normative epidermic notion of beauty, associated with youth, luxury, stars, and, at least implicitly, whiteness. Although the passage does not mention race, its call for clean and hygienic as opposed to dirty faces, and its generally servile stance toward the lily-white Hollywood model, suggest a coded reference to the subject. 6 At times, the racial reference becomes more explicit. One editorialist calls for Brazilian cinema to be an act of purification of our reality, emphasizing progress, modern engineering, and our beautiful white people. The same author warns against documentaries as more likely to include undesirable elements: Barthes, R. (1988 (1968)) ¿The Death of the Author¿, in D. Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London and New York: Longman, 167-72.

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Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. With extraordinary transnational and transdisciplinary range, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media comprehensively explores the genealogies, vocabularies, and concepts orienting the fields within literature, cinema, and media studies. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (co-authored with Ella Shohat) won the Katherine Singer Kovács "Best Film Book" Award in 1994. Stam's Subversive Pleasures; Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film was a Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year" in 1989 and Runner-Up for the Katherine Singer Kovács "Best Film Book" Award in the same year.

Alternative Museum of New York 1989. Prisoners of Image: Ethnic and Gender Stereotypes. New York: The Museum. Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy," co-written with Ella Shohat. New Literary History, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Summer 2009) Murray, Simone (2012) The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. New York: Routledge.The most complete anthology for scholars interested in psychoanalysis, semiotics, and ideological criticism. Includes accurate translations of several essays originally written in French. The concern with issues of colonialism, postcolonialism, race, and cultural difference also found expression in a number of seminal texts co-authored with Ella Shohat. Their 1985 Screen essay “The Cinema After Babel: Language, Difference, Power,” introduced a Bakhtinian “translinguistic” and trans-structuralist turn into the study of language difference, translation, and postsynchronization in the cinema. Their Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994) formed part of and helped shape the surge of writing about race, colonialism, identity politics, and postcoloniality in the 1990s. Edward Said Unthinking Eurocentrism a “brilliant” and landmark book". The book combines two strands of work – an ambitious study of colonialist discourse and Eurocentrism – and a comprehensive and transnational study of cinematic texts related to those issues.

think critically about the migration of stories and ideas across different historical, geographical and generic areas. Allen, Richard 1989. Representation, Meaning, and Experience in the Cinema: A Critical Study of Contemporary Film Theory. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers, 2000), coauthored with Ella Shohat

Armstrong, Dan 1989. “Wiseman’s Realm of Transgression: Titicut Follies, the Symbolic Father and the Spectacle of Confinement,” Cinema Journal Vol. 29, No. 1 (Fall). Corrigan, T. (1999) Film and Literature: An Introduction and a Reader. Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice-Hall Foucault, M. (1986 (1969)) ¿What is an Author¿, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 101-20. Aragay, Mireia, (ed.) (2005) Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Amsterdam / New York : Rodopi,.

The course takes an expanded approach to the question of adaptation, seeing film as not simply based on literary antecedents but as an art form which draws on other forms of art. It will consider movements across genres - from literary classics to comic books - and across historical periods and geographical spaces. Leitch, Thomas (2007) Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press.