Books to Bollywood

(Formerly ENGLISH 110A) This course will investigate filmic adaptations of Anglophone literary texts in India. We will study popular films as well as Indian art cinema, alongside their novelistic inspirations, which range from seventeenth century texts to twenty-­first century ones. The course's multi­media approach will require students to interpret novels and films in relation to and in dialogue with one another, analyzing not only the pair of texts but the process of adaptation itself. Doing so will raise cultural questions around globalization, universalism and feminism, as well as generic questions regarding the limitations and strengths of different media to represent different kinds of stories. We will situate all these questions within a larger discussion of the relationship of medium to modernity in India. Students will also gain the terminology and the analytic framework needed to write cogently about the two different media, both on their own and in relation to one another.