Ray, R. B. (2000) ¿The Field of ¿Literature and Film¿¿, in J. Naremore (ed.) Film Adaptation. London: Athlone, 38-53. Gledhill, Christine, and Linda Williams, eds. Reinventing Film Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke, 1997)

Cinema and Media Studies

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. Auerbach, Erich 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 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:

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Stam completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley in 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since. Stam's graduate work ranged across Anglo-American literature, French and Francophone literature, and Luso-Brazilian literature. His dissertation was published as a book, Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1985). Rothwell, K. S. (2004 (1999)) A History of Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geraghty, Christine (2008). Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield. Intended as a complement to Stam and Miller 2000, a variety of commissioned essays interrogate and expand the reach of film and media theory. Would work for an advanced undergraduate class. Film theory is what Bakhtin would call a historically situated utterance. And just as one cannot separate the history of film theory from the history of the arts and of artistic discourse, so one cannot separate it from history tout court, defined by Fredric Jameson as that which hurts but also as that which inspires. In the long view, the history of film, and therefore of film theory, must be seen in the light of the growth of nationalism, within which cinema became a strategic instrument for projecting national imaginaries. It must also be seen in relation to colonialism, the process by which the European powers reached positions of economic, military, political, and cultural hegemony in much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. (While nations had often annexed adjacent territories, what was new in European colonialism was its planetary reach, its attempted submission of the world to a single universal regime of truth and power.) This process reached its apogee at the turn of the twentieth century, when the earth surface controlled by European powers rose from 67 percent (1884) to 84.4 percent (1914), a situation that began to be reversed only with the disintegration of the European colonial empires after World War II. 1With 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. Ahmad, Aijaz 1987. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory,” Social Text 17 (Fall). 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. Robert Stam (born October 29, 1941) is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. [1] Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. Together with Ella Shohat, he co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.

Mobilizing Fictions: The Gulf War, the Media and the Recruitment of the Spectator," Public Culture Vol.4, No.2 (Spring 1992). The most complete anthology for scholars interested in psychoanalysis, semiotics, and ideological criticism. Includes accurate translations of several essays originally written in French. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994), coauthored with Ella ShohatNaremore, J. (1990) ¿Authorship and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism¿, Film Quarterly 44 (1), 14-22. Abel, Richard 1988. French Film: Theory and Criticism 1907–1939, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference and Power," Screen, Vol. XXVI, Nos. 3-4 (May- Aug 1985). Foucault, M. (1986 (1969)) ¿What is an Author¿, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 101-20. Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey.… It is no life but its shadow.… And all this in a strange silence where no rumble of wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people. (Quoted in Leyda, 1972, pp. 407–9)

The popular masses, uncouth and infantile, experience while sitting in front of the screen the enchantment of the child to whom the grandmother has recounted a fairy tale; but I fail to understand how, night after night, a group of people who have the obligation of being civilized can idiotize themselves [in movie theaters] with the incessant repetition of scenes in which the abberations, anachronisms, inverisimilitudes, are made ad hoc for a public of the lowest mental level, ignorant of the most elementary educational notions. (Mora, 1988, p. 6)Several film and media scholars have published books—some of them hefty—that collect significant writings from the history of cinema study. Stam and Miller 2000 and the several editions of Braudy and Cohen 2009 have found a large audience among students and scholars. Earlier, Nichols 1985 and Rosen 1986 collected crucial texts in the traditions of grand theory. Easthope 1993 has tried to pare down the large bibliography on theory to its essentials, while Gledhill and Williams 2000, Miller and Stam 1999, and Palmer 1989 have commissioned new essays that take a metacritical stance toward the material. A streamlined collection of essays introducing readers to some basic texts of film theory along with foundational essays by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. For graduate students and advanced undergraduates. One might even expand the discussion to examine the proto-theoretical implications of the etymologies of the words for pre-cinematic devices: camera obscura (dark room) evokes the processes of photography, Marx’s comparison of ideology to a camera obscura, and the name of a feminist film journal. Magic lantern evokes the perennial theme of movie magic along with Romanticism’s creative lamp and the Enlightenment’s lantern. Phantasmagoria and phasmotrope (spectacle-turn) evoke fantasy and the marvelous, while cosmorama evokes the global world-making ambitions of the cinema. Marey’s fusil cinématographique (cinematic rifle) evokes the shooting process of film while calling attention to the aggressive potential of the camera as a weapon, a metaphor resurrected in the guerrilla cinema of the revolutionary filmmakers of the 1960s. Mutoscope suggests a viewer of change, while phenakistiscope evokes cheating views, a foreshadowing of Baudrillard’s simulacrum. Many of the names for the cinema include some variant on graph (Greek writing or transcription) and thus anticipate later tropes of filmic authorship and écriture. The German lichtspiel (play of light) is one of the few names to reference light. Not surprisingly, given the silent beginnings of the medium, the appelations given the cinema rarely reference sound, although Edison saw the cinema as an extension of the phonograph and gave his pre-cinematic devices such names as optical phonograph and kinetophonograph (the writing of movement and sound). The initial attempts to synchronize sound and image generated such coinages as cameraphone and cinephone. In Arabic the cinema was called sum mutaharika (moving image or form), while in Hebrew the word for cinema evolved from reinoa (watching movement) to kolnoa (sound movement). Otherwise, the names themselves imply that film is essentially visual, a view often buttressed by the historical argument that cinema existed first as image and then as sound; in fact, of course, cinema was usually accompanied both by language (intertitles, visible mouthings of speech) and by music (pianos, orchestras). Cohen, K. (1979) Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Cahir, Linda Constanzo. (2006) Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc..