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MLitt Module

EN52007: Joyce and the Cinema

Module Organiser: Dr Keith Williams

This option investigates the fiction of James Joyce and its parallelism and creative synergy with the narrative modes and techniques of film (including through adaptations of his own works). It analyses the ‘intermediality’ between Joyce’s themes and styles and those of cinema, as they developed from the 1890s onwards. You will aquire detailed knowledge and understanding of Joyce’s fictions and the filmic terms and examples with which they interact, within their specific cultural-historical contexts. You will explore and develop arguments about one of the historically critical encounters between ‘High’ Modernist literary experiment and the new popular medium of film.

We will focus on a specific text (or chapter) and film at each meeting and discuss specific themes and questions of technique which connect and/or distinguish their respective media. This will develop into a critical overview and dialogue about the evolving intertextuality between Joyce’s fiction and the cinema. It will enable students to select and devise their own approach to a particular aspect of that intertextuality in their research essay.

Syllabus

  1. Introduction: Joyce and the Cinema: the Anatomy of an Intimate Relationship
  2. The Composite Novel and the ‘Fragmented’ City: text , Dubliners (1914); film, The Dead (dir. John Huston, 1987)
  3. Narrative Focalisation and the ‘Camera-I’: text, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15) : film, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (dir. Joseph Strick, 1977)
  4. The Interior Monologue and (Eisenstein) Montage: text, Ulysses (1922); film, Ulysses (dir. Joseph Strick, 1967)
  5. ‘Symphonies of the Big City’: Montage Documentaries and the Joycean Metropolis: text, Ulysses (1922); films, Berlin: Symphony of a Big City (dir. Walther Ruttmann, 1927), The Man with the Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929)
  6. ‘Vision Animated to Bursting Point’: Modernist Experiment and Filmic Styles: text, Ulysses (1922); film, Bloom (dir. Sean Walsh, 2003)

Assessment

One research essay of not more than 5,000 words.

Primary Texts (preferably Oxford ‘World’s Classics’)

Primary Films

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