This unit advances a central heresy: the dominant orientation to adaptation — that the book is original, the film derivative — is not merely naïve but critically incurious. Working across four text/film pairings, students examine a recurring move in canonical cinema: directors diagnosing the structural flaws of their source texts and producing the film as the theoretically informed correction. The director, on this argument, is functioning as a literary critic — identifying what the text suppressed, what it was reaching for and could not hold, what it formally could not deliver, and encoding the response in cinematic decisions.
The course is built around a 60-minute plenary lecture that establishes the central argument across all four cases, followed by four discrete 90-minute seminars, each opening one text/film pairing in greater depth. The seminars precede the lecture — students arrive at the plenary having already done close work on a pairing, giving them a stake in the argument before they hear it made in full. Designed for advanced secondary and early undergraduate contexts, the unit bridges IB DP English and Undergraduate Film and Literary Studies, drawing on a shared theoretical vocabulary from adaptation theory, deconstruction, and philosophy of cinema.
Linda Hutcheon: A Theory of Adaptation
Hutcheon's foundational argument is that adaptations are neither translations nor copies but palimpsests — texts existing in continuing dialogue with their sources, layered and simultaneous. Her distinction between telling, showing, and interacting modes provides the vocabulary for all four seminars, allowing students to map how the shift from prose to cinema reorganizes the audience's relation to the material. The fidelity question — "was the film faithful?" — is, on Hutcheon's account, the wrong question. The right question is what the film reads in the book.
Harold Bloom: Strong Misreading
Bloom's claim that the history of literature is the history of strong misreading — creative, agonic, transformative encounters with a precursor — is transplanted here to the history of canonical adaptation. These directors are not translating their sources; they are misreading them in Bloom's precise sense: diagnosing what the text did not know about itself and producing the correction. Luhrmann misreads Shakespeare's centre; Scott misreads Dick's binary; Cuarón misreads James's genre; Kubrick misreads Clarke's kernel.
Jacques Derrida: The Supplement
The supplement — that which appears merely to add to what is already complete, but turns out to expose a lack at the heart of what looked whole — provides the structural argument of the lecture. The four films are supplements in Derrida's exact sense: each appears to expand its source, and each reveals, on examination, what was missing from the source all along. The supplement converts the discussion of adaptation into a discussion of what reading is when reading is given all the tools of cinema.
Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message
McLuhan's argument from Understanding Media — that any medium reorganizes the scale and pace of human attention regardless of content — is the theoretical apparatus for Seminar 1 and frames the entire course argument. The question of what cinema can do that prose cannot is, at its core, a McLuhanesque question. Kubrick's most daring move is to enact McLuhan's claim rather than illustrate it: the monolith and the screen share aspect ratio. The film has been showing us the monolith all along by being one.
The lecture establishes the course's central argument — adaptation as critical practice — moving through all four cases in sequence and building toward a general claim about the relationship between cinema, criticism, and what reading looks like when given a budget, a crew, and 70mm of celluloid.
Each seminar opens one text/film pairing in advance of its appearance in the lecture. Students arrive having read the source text, watched the film, and completed two scholarly readings — one general (transferable theoretical vocabulary), one specific (argumentative essay on the film). The seminar's job is to convert that purchase into argument. All four plans share the same internal arc: warm prompt, reading-anchored task, scene-anchored task, and an exit ticket that bridges to the lecture. The sequence is intentional: Kubrick first, because the source-to-film gulf is largest and the course's structural argument is most undeniable there; Cuarón last, because by week four students should be capable of holding two competing readings in tension without collapsing the disagreement.