Alessandra Raengo

A companion to literature and film

List of Illustrations. Notes on Contributors. Preface. Acknowledgments. 1. Novels, Films, and the Word/Image Wars: Kamilla Elliott (University of California at Berkeley). 2. Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies Of Adaptation: Ella Shohat (New York University). 3. Gospel Truth? From Cecil B. DeMille to Nicholas Ray: Pamela Grace (New York University). 4. Transecriture and Narrative Mediatics: The Stakes of Intermediality: Andre Gaudreault (University of Montreal) and Philippe Marion. 5. The Look: From Film to Novel: An Essay in Comparative Narratology: Francois Jost (Sorbonne). 6. Adaptation and Mis--adaptations: Film, Literature, and Social Discourses: Francesco Casetti (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart). 7. The Invisible Novelty: Film Adaptations in the 1910s: Yuri Tsivian (University of Chicago). 8. Italy and America: Pinocchioa s First Cinematic Trip: Raffaele De Berti (University of Milan). 9. The Intertextuality of Early Cinema: A Prologue to Fantomas: Tom Gunning (University of Chicago). 10. Cosmopolitan Projections: World Literature on Chinese Screens: Zhang Zhen (New York University). 11. The Rhetoric of Interruption: Allen Weiss (New York University). 12. Visualizing The Voice: Joyce, Cinema And The Politics Of Vision: Luke Gibbons (University of Notre Dame). 13. Adapting Cinema to History: a Revolution in the Making: Dudley Andrew (Yale University). 14. Photographic Verismo, Cinematic Adaptation, and the Staging of a Neorealist Landscape: Noa Steimatsky (Yale University). 15. The Devila s Parody: Horace McCoya s Appropriation and Refiguration of Two Hollywood Musicals: Charles Musser (Yale University). 16. The Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies: The Example of Film Noir: R. Barton Palmer (Clemson University). 17. Adapting Farewell, My Lovely: William Luhr (Columbia University). 18. Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock: Richard Allen (New York University). 19. Running Time: The Chronotope of The Loneliness of the Long--Distance Runner: Peter Hitchcock (Baruch College, CUNY). 20. From Libertinage to Eric Rohmer: Transcending a Adaptationa : Maria Tortajada (University of Lausanne). 21. The Moment of Portraiture: Scorsese Reads Wharton: Brigitte Peucker (Yale University). 22. The Talented Post--structuralist: Hetero--masculinity, Gay Artifice, and Class Passing: Chris Straayer (New York University). 23. From Bram Stokera s Dracula to Bram Stokera s Dracula: Margaret Montalbano (New York University). 24. The Bible as Cultural Object[s] in Cinema: Gavriel Moses (University of California at Berkeley). 25. Alla s Wells that Ends Wells: Apocalypse and Empire in The War of the Worlds: Julian Cornell (New York University). Index

Out of the Literary Comfort Zone: Adaptation, Embodiment, and Assimilation

This chapter pursues a deliberately unusual approach to teaching adaptation. It is motivated by an investment in understanding what is at stake when the very idea of adaptation comes under pressure, that is, when its very occurrence appears to be effaced. Focusing on these situations offers the possibility for adaptation studies to illuminate something that the very process of adaptation might be elaborating vis-a-vis its larger cultural and social context: for example, in the case studies under consideration here, the process of racial assimilation. I came to this conclusion studying the reception of two films centered on African-American characters: rather than referring back to the films’ literary sources, film commentators discussed the actors’ bodies as if they were both the source and the destination of the adaptation process, and the ultimate guarantee of its ‘fidelity’. The first film is The Jackie Robinson Story (Alfred Green, 1950), an adaptation of the first Robinson biography in which the baseball player plays himself. The second is the Oscar-nominated film Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009).1