Protestant Ambivalence Toward Allegory in Wim Wenders’s The Scarlet Letter

Wim Wenders, West German filmmaker of increasing renown, has declared that Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu is his “only master,” although Wenders did not actually encounter Ozu's films until 1973. By that time Ozu was dead and Wenders had completed film school, made seven shorts and three feature films (Summer in the City, 1970; The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 1972; and The Scarlet Letter, 1973), and begun the script for Alice in the Cities. Japanese films are rarely shown in West Germany; Wenders first saw Ozu's films in New York City. He then introduced the films to his friend and sometime collaborator, avant-garde writer Peter Handke, who evidently was also enthusiastic, for he made frequent visual references to Ozu in his film The Left-Handed Woman (1978) and even included a clip from Ozu's silent Tokyo Chorus (1931).

<i>The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings</i>, by Leland S. Person

In 1923, the film director Victor Seastrom (né Sjöström), then Sweden's most renowned filmmaker, was recruited to Hollywood by Goldwyn Pictures, where he made eight silent pictures and one talkie in seven years, among them a 1926 version of 'The Scarlet Letter'. What elements of Swedish cinema did he bring with him to the States, and how were these techniques transformed by Hollywood? This is the first book-length study dedicated to the films of Sjöström (1879–1960) and how he functioned in the studio system of 1920s Hollywood. Bo Florin explores the ways the director applied his austere and naturalistic film style in a radically different context and discusses how his films were received in Hollywood.

The films of Claire Denis probe the idea of global citizenship and trace the borderlines of family, desire, nationality and power. Her films, including Chocolat, Beau travail and White Material explore connections between national experience and individual circumstance, visualizing the complications of such dualities. Following a foreword by Wim Wenders, international contributors explore the themes she addresses in her films, such as kinship and landscape, neo-colonialism and New French Extremity. Original interviews with an editor, actor and two composers familiar with Denis's working style and with Denis herself, also reveal fresh facets of this intrepid filmmaker.

As Larry J. Reynolds states in his preface to the essay collection that follows, Hawthorne has maintained “a constant presence” in treatments of American literature since the original publication of his Romances (ix). Whether that is due to a timeless or objective quality of his writing, or because, as Gordon Hutner has argued elsewhere, “his writing has always elicited a critical reaction that fairly well encapsulates the prevailing social tendencies and critical preoccupations embedded in our rhetorics of interpretation and appreciation,” his place in literary scholarship and on undergraduate curricula seems about as secure as any writer's (Hutner, “Whose Hawthorne?” The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Richard H. Millington, Cambridge UP, 2004, p. 252).However, while Hawthorne hangs onto a certain “cultural and pedagogical centrality” (xiii), even as the canon evolves and student interest in literature waxes and wanes, the reasons for continuing to read and teach Hawthorne are perhaps not so obvious as they once were. Christopher Diller and Samuel Coale have compiled in Nathaniel Hawthorne in the College Curriculum a rich and suggestive collection of essays that will prompt and inspire instructors to situate Hawthorne in a variety of contexts where he might continue to play a constructive role for students of literature. Perceiving a gap in the pedagogical scholarship, Diller and Coale guide instructors in their attempts to integrate Hawthorne into updated college courses in dialogue with such diverse fields as disability studies, film and adaptation studies, material culture studies, digital humanities, and transnational studies. By presenting a wide variety of essays across these different contexts, they encourage classroom practitioners to reflect upon Hawthorne's “centrality” in a way that responds to the critical trends of the last forty years and the changing nature of American postsecondary education.The book is divided into four roughly equal parts. The first two, “The Romances” and “The Short Stories,” present approaches that either focus on a particular text or draw thematic connections across several texts. The latter two parts, “Institutional and International Contexts” and “Performative and Visual Contexts,” highlight the audiences or situations of particular moments of teaching practice. While it can be difficult to organize such a wide-ranging group of essays, this division skillfully places the individual pieces in dialogue with one another within and across the four parts.Part 1 provides a series of approaches to teaching Hawthorne's book-length fiction. Patricia D. Valenti's and Richard Kopley's respective essays each provide historical context for The Scarlet Letter beyond what one would find in standard background materials. Valenti suggests a productive way to leverage students' inherent curiosity about authors' biographies through comparing the courtship of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne to the presentation of gender in the romance. Kopley, in contrast, discusses his use in the classroom of The Salem Belle as an intertextual means of explaining the role of the Antinomian Controversy in The Scarlet Letter. Each of these essays is exemplary in describing the use of unexpected outside texts, such as Sophia's Cuba Journal, the letters, and The Salem Belle. The pieces by Robert T. Talley Jr. and Sarah Wadsworth fruitfully turn to readings of the formal qualities of the romances. Talley uses The House of the Seven Gables as a means of understanding realism and the nature of “Romance” itself in Hawthorne's writing while Wadsworth applies a “History of the Book approach” to The Blithedale Romance, an approach that revises students' close reading techniques through attention to the material conditions of that reading. Each of these essays is concerned with the nature of the reading experience itself, a foremost concern of any teacher as students begin to grapple with Hawthorne in the college classroom. The final two essays of part 1 focus on thematic approaches to Hawthorne's books, Zachary Lamm's on the treatment of sexuality in The Scarlet Letter and Monika Elbert's on Hawthorne's revisions and “Americanization” of the transnational Gothic mode across each of the four finished romances. Both provide useful perspectives on Hawthorne's works in any context, but particularly in approaching literature through these comparative or genre-based lenses.Part 2 presents a similar combination of formal and thematic readings of Hawthorne's most commonly taught short fiction. Rosemary Fisk and Nancy Bunge both provide accounts of using Hawthorne in interdisciplinary settings, emphasizing how this makes Hawthorne less intimidating and more accessible for many students. Fisk reads “The Minister's Black Veil” in a core curriculum course to show how it resonates in contemporary debates surrounding the veil and other elements of Islam in multicultural societies while Bunge notes how Hawthorne's short stories are transformed when read alongside philosophical texts, thereby motivating students to feel “pleasure and freedom” in engaging literature's “complexity and depth” (124). Gabriela Serrano also reads “The Minister's Black Veil,” alongside “Rappaccini's Daughter,” to introduce the concept of framing techniques as a means of helping students become more active readers in survey courses. Jonathan Murphy and Jennifer Schell each turn to the consistently popular “Young Goodman Brown.” Murphy uses the short story as a means of relating history to questions of ethics and religious practice while Schell, reading the story alongside “Roger Malvin's Burial,” outlines what she describes as the “ecoGothic,” Hawthorne's rewriting of Gothic tropes and the connection of the Gothic tradition to nature. The final two essays of the section, one by Scott Ellis and one by Aaron D. Cobb and Eric Sterling, both turn to the treatment of science and technology in Hawthorne's short fiction, thus allowing students to consider not only the impact of science on their own lives but also Hawthorne's investigation of what Ellis terms the potential “moral transformation” caused by technology (133).Part 3 moves away from presentations of readings or activities around distinct texts and focuses on those contexts in which students might encounter Hawthorne. The first two essays present questions of audience: Jason Courtmanche's describes partnerships with high school programs and Chikako D. Kumamoto's discusses teaching Hawthorne to community college students. Courtmanche explains how he has created exchanges linking undergraduate education majors with high-school students as discussion partners and linking college professors as partners with high-school instructors. Both forms of partnership leverage the advantages of each population with the “shared responsibility” of improving students' literacy practices (161). Kumamoto explains how she has combined The Scarlet Letter with readings of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic as a way to establish the classroom as a “contact zone” for the diverse academic goals of a community college population (174). The remaining four essays of the section outline different research-oriented approaches toward student encounters with Hawthorne's texts. T. Gregory Garvey describes how Hawthornean skepticism and his relations to reformist movements of his time present “carefully contextualized research problems for historical and theoretical analysis” (194). Similarly, Donald Ross's elaboration of a senior seminar on Hawthorne and the Brontë sisters offers a series of thematic connections to foster classroom dialogue and student projects. The remaining essays of the section, those of Ivonne M. García and Sandra Hughes, are two of the strongest of the collection for their combination of theoretical framing and unique classroom activities. García describes her senior seminar on Hawthorne, which uses a “post-nationalist approach” to read an impressive array of Hawthorne's writing and related texts; her approach allows both readings of works rarely attempted in the classroom and the application of important historicist and cultural studies modes of analysis to Hawthorne's works. Hughes describes her incorporation of The Marble Faun into a study-abroad experience, where visits to specific sites and readings of Roman works of art and history add a remarkable depth of context and understanding to Hawthorne's book, particularly with his complex presentation of Hilda and Miriam.While part 3 focuses primarily on literature courses, the final section of the book reaches toward other contexts; it presents Hawthorne's works in interaction with the arts and other disciplinary settings. Sari Altschuler and Michael Demson provide theoretical frameworks with which any number of Hawthorne texts might be investigated with students. Altschuler sketches a very useful guide to the ways in which the interdisciplinary field of disability studies can open up new readings of The Scarlet Letter and renew our approach to how language and signification work in the romance. Demson reads “puppets, automata, and machinery” in Hawthorne as part of the “central concerns of international Romanticism, including self-consciousness, self-individuation, and self-management” (247). For him, these mechanical figures can serve not only to connect Hawthorne with wider artistic trends but also to relate Hawthorne to European philosophical currents and contemporary theoretical lenses. The remaining four essays of the section deal with elements of cinema's relation to Hawthorne's works. Alberto Gabriele discusses the importance of what he characterizes as “pre-cinematic spectacles” in The House of the Seven Gables (259). While there is a good deal of scholarship on portraiture and daguerreotypy in the romance, for him the effects of industrial changes to visual and performative entertainments, including mesmerism, are a key interpretive guide to the text. Walter Squire compellingly compares Hawthorne's presentation of “scientific anxiety” with the history of film while the essays of Nassim Winnie Balestrini and of Danuta Fjellestad and Elisabeth Herion Sarafidis both focus on the various film adaptations of The Scarlet Letter. Squire's essay provides a way to connect Hawthorne's concerns with science, in dialogue with the several other essays in the collection that speak to this interest, with those presented across the history of film. Balestrini takes up the 2010 film Easy A and Miranda July's 2007 short story “Birthmark” as recent works inspired by Hawthorne through the use of Hawthorne as a foundation with which to explore presentations of gender and the revision of historical record through art. Fjellestad and Sarafidis's essay also explores gender in Hawthorne and our reading of it, specifically through the lens of the 1934 and 1995 film adaptations of The Scarlet Letter. A close reading of these two films' versions of Hester Prynne reveal “how our own cultural preconceptions inevitably are brought to bear on the novel” (311).A book-length collection dedicated to the teaching of Hawthorne is a welcome addition, as this subject “has been surprisingly neglected” despite the continuing popularity of Hawthorne in the classroom and in American literary scholarship (xvii). According to Diller and Coale, this is the first such collection to be published, which seems difficult to believe. As such, and given that the central audience of the book seems to be instructors of undergraduate students, it is logical that a majority of essays that focus on the four finished romances, particularly The Scarlet Letter, and a few of the most canonical short stories, such as “The Birth-Mark,” “The Minister's Black Veil,” “Rappaccini's Daughter,” and “Young Goodman Brown.” However, as the editors explain, the diversity of Hawthorne's authorial productions has gained greater notice in scholarship in recent decades: “[U]ndergraduate study of Hawthorne now includes a wide bandwidth of both his well-known and lesser known works, including all his published romances, many tales, and even his sketches, writings for children, and political essays” (xviii). It is somewhat disappointing, then, that the essays that follow include few discussions of these more infrequently taught texts, though it is noteworthy how often the notebooks and letters appear across the essays. Perhaps the depth and variety of this collection will inspire others to continue to pave this pedagogical path for these texts of which many students and scholars remain unaware.While the essays of the collection are consistent in their quality, the presentation of the text includes a number of unfortunate oversights. Formatting errors appear throughout the book, particularly errors relating to presenting footnotes, formatting titles, and indicating quotations. While these generally do not interfere with one's understanding of any given essay, at times they create a certain amount of confusion in the reading experience. Many of the typographical mistakes should have been caught for this, the second edition. While Edward Everett Root Publishers has done a great service in putting this text back into print following the closure of AMS Press, which published the first edition in 2017, the book would have benefitted from a closer revision. Further, while each individual essay provides helpful footnotes, a bibliographical apparatus would have been a great advantage to all readers. Much of the previous scholarship on pedagogical approaches to Hawthorne is scattered across journals and collections, and few, if any, of the essays here engage with that previous scholarship or any more general elaborations of theories or techniques with regards to teaching literature. A full index would have been helpful, as well as an annotated bibliography of in-print editions and anthologies that instructors in the volume have used in the classroom.As Diller and Coale stated in their introduction, such a collection of essays is long overdue. The texts gathered here provide a sense of the diversity of the pedagogical approaches to which Hawthorne's writings lend themselves. While several of the essays are focused on theoretical concerns that inform a particular approach, most take care to describe the particular classroom situation of the author and suggest means of application for other instructors. Several writers, such as Kopley and Courtmanche, provide admirable detail in explaining particular class sessions or the steps with which they have designed particular exercises. The essays of Wadsworth and Ellis are noteworthy in their incorporation of digital humanities methods and exercises in their described courses, and there are inspiring and creative assignments and activities provided throughout, such as the productive against-the-grain use of SparkNotes that Altschuler describes in her course. For experienced educators and those considering teaching Hawthorne for the first time alike, Nathaniel Hawthorne in the College Classroom should provide a number of provocations for classroom practice.

Between North-South Civil War and East-West Manifest Destiny: Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” as Geo-Historical Allegory

Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

Contents: SECTION A -Putting the pioneers in context - films and filmmakers before the First World War: But the khaki-covered camera is the latest thing - the Boer War cinema and visual culture in Britain, Simon Popple James Williamson's rescue narratives, Frank Gray Cecil Hepworth, Alice in Wonderland and the development of the narrative film, Andrew Higson Putting the world before you - the Charles Urban story, Luke McKernan It would be a mistake to strive for subtlety of effect - Richard III and populist, pantomime Shakespeare in the 1910s, Jon Burrows. Section B Going to the cinema - audiences, exhibition and reception from the 1890s to the 1910s: Indecent Incentives to Vice- Regulating Films and Audience Behaviour from the 1890s to the 1910s, Lise Shapiro. Nothing more than a 'craze' - cinema building in Britain from 1909 to 1914, Nicholas Hiley Letters to America: a case study in the exhibition and reception of American films in Britain, 1914-18, Mike Hammond. Section C A full supporting programme - serials, cinemagazines, interest films, travelogues and travel films, and film music in the 1910s and 1920s: British series and serials in the silent era, Alex Marlow-Mann spice of the perfect programme - the weekly magazine film during the silent period, Jenny Hammerton Shakespeare's country - the national poet, English identity and British silent cinema, Roberta E. Pearson Representing African - from ethnographic exhibitions to Nionga and Stampede, Emma Sandon Distant trumpets - the score to The Flag Lieutenant and music of the British silent cinema, Neil Brand. Section D feature film at home and abroad - mainstream cinema from the end of the First World War to the coming of sound: Writing screen plays - Stannard and Hitchcock, Charles Barr H.G. Wells and British silent cinema - the war of the worlds, Sylvia Hardy War-torn Dionysus - the silent passion of Ivor Novello, Michael Williams Tackling the Big Boy of Empire - British Film in Australia, 1918-1931, Mike Walsh. Section E - Taking the cinema seriously - the emergence of an intellectual film culture in the 1920s: Film Society and the creation of an alternative film culture in Britain in the 1920s, Jamie Sexton Towards a critical practice - Ivor Montagu and British film culture in the 1920s, Gerry Turvey Writing the cinema into daily life - Iris Barry and the emergence of British film criticism in the 1920s, Haidee Wasson. Section F Bibliographical and archival resources: A guide to bibliographic and archival sources on British cinema before the First World War, Stephen Bottomore A guide to bibliographic and archival sources on British cinema from the First World War to the coming of sound, Jon Burrows Bibliography - British cinema before 1930.

Reviewed by: Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage by Jonathan M. Hess Anat Feinberg Jonathan M. Hess. Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 263 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000278 Why a book about a tear-jerking melodrama that is scarcely remembered today? In his last book, Deborah and Her Sisters, which appeared shortly before his sudden and untimely death, Jonathan M. Hess makes the case for a reappraisal of one the great blockbusters of the nineteenth century: Salomon Hermann Mosenthal's play Deborah. Following its premiere in Hamburg in 1849, this play about a beautiful Jewish woman forsaken by her Christian lover took German and Austrian stages by storm. It was performed throughout Europe, the British Empire, and North America, giving rise to innumerable spin-offs. Millions of people saw the play and felt for the suffering Jewess. Hess argues that the audiences' tears should be taken seriously. He shows how the play provided both Jewish and non-Jewish theatergoers with an opportunity to develop empathy for Jewish suffering in a century in which the theatrical representation of Jews was still shaped by Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. In his introduction, Hess points to other literary and theatrical stereotypes of Jews during that period, such as the figure of the belle juive or Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's noble Jew Nathan. Subsequent chapters focus on the place of Deborah in this long theatrical tradition. The first chapter offers a close and illuminating analysis of the original text, probing the literary techniques by which Mosenthal, a successful Jewish playwright and author of opera libretti, fostered empathy for his Jewish heroine. In a rural Austrian village, Joseph is torn between his Christian sweetheart Hanna and the Jewish Deborah. The personal conflict turns into a touchstone for the entire community. As Hess notes, the power of the play derives "from tensions between Christian modes of compassion and the quest for a more secular ethos of liberal sympathy" (39). The drama of the Jewess Deborah who abandons her vows of vengeance to seek reconciliation with Christians also features the figure of a male Jewish leader, Ruben, whose praise of America as a secular paradise where Jews and Christians are joined in "brotherly love" prompts Deborah's change of mind. The transformation of an embittered, rancorous woman into a proponent of universal humanity and love gained thunderous ovations from spectators. Hess observes that the highly emotional story "was elaborately constructed around the goal of making sympathy with Jewish suffering into the ultimate theatrical pleasure, one that allowed spectators to revel in their own liberal sentiments" (61). The second chapter describes the worldwide success of the play while also considering the various adaptations of Deborah—all of which offered, as it were, variations on a theme. Mosenthal's play was translated into numerous languages and performed around the globe, including in Australia, India, and Jamaica. Augustin Daly's adaptation of the play, Leah, the Forsaken—"an even more dramatic tearjerker," according to Hess (86)—was successfully staged in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Published about a decade after Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, the play took up the themes of "bigotry, superstition and intolerance" (81). No [End Page 235] less successful was Charles Smith Cheltnam's version Deborah; or, the Jewish Maiden's Wrong. In its highly dramatic last scene, the tormented, proud Jewess is murdered by the malicious schoolmaster whom she accuses as, "Hypocrite! … Disgrace of Israel!" (96). Hess shows how both Daly and Cheltnam sought to outdo Mosenthal by giving the audience a "thrill and a good cry." In addition to these and other adaptations (including poems, operas, and even three silent movies), Hess points to a rich tradition of parodies and satires. The British Debo-Leah, premiered in London in 1864, ends with the heroine Debo-Leah marrying her nemesis Nathan, after informing the audience that she would not have done so "if this wasn't a Burlesque" (109). The original Deborah and her various offshoots owe much of...

Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975

The Left Handed Women of Peter Handke and Jimmy Reed Russell E. Brown (bio) The Austrian Writer Peter Handke (born 1942) published Die linkshändige Frau in 1976. Originally conceived as a film script, the story was filmed by Handke and Wim Wenders the following year. Both versions achieved a remarkable popular success for this onetime cryptic and uncompromising literary avant-gardist. The text is the disarmingly simple account of the separation of a thirty-year-old woman from her husband and the subsequent months of life alone with her son in a suburban villa. Handke restricts himself, in the manner of the nouveau roman, to an objective reporting of events and conversations, providing neither an authorial voice nor the inner voice of his heroine, Marianne. Thus the motivation for Marianne's sudden break with her husband Bruno or for her subsequent actions is never revealed, and the sparse story has given rise to many contradictory interpretations, as the critics try to complete the text, ranging from a document of woman's emancipation1 like Ibsen's A Doll's House to an account of [End Page 395] the author's own marriage breakup2 with reversed colors to a chauvinist critique of contemporary woman's search for autonomy.3 A certain intertextual illumination may be provided by the title itself and its subsequent application in the story. In popular culture left-handedness signifies differentness from social norms, clumsiness, or strangeness. It used to be considered a fault that had to be corrected in children. The main character Marianne is never shown or said to be "left-handed" in the text itself (she is color-blind). In the mirrors in which she often contemplates herself, she would of course appear to be opposite-handed. In the film version Marianne is right-handed. The title alone identifies Marianne as left-handed, as a notable, problematic, or eccentric person. The title is derived from a song on a phonograph record she repeatedly listened to on a particular night or on many nights: "In der Nacht saß die Frau allein im Wohnraum und hörte Musik, immer wieder dieselbe Platte" ("The Left-Handed Woman" 100-101). It should be noted that the song's title is given in English, although the quoted text that follows is in German. Apparently Marianne is listening to an English-language record for whose text Handke then supplies a German translation, while leaving the title in the original. Some German critics of the story use the song's text as a "Verständnishilfe" (Sandberg 59) or state "Der Titel fusst auf einem Schlagertext, der das Thema intoniert" (Schultz, quoted in Fellinger 227), without seeking an external model. Christoph Bartmann declares "Der Name . . . kommt von einer fiktiven Singlesplatte" (221). A major Handke expert, Manfred Durzak, identifies the song as "The Left Handed Woman der amerikanischen Country-Blues Sängers Jimmy Reed . . . in seiner deutschen Version in den Text montiert" (145). Other critics, such as Rolf Gunter Renner (106) and Doris Runzheimer (127), acknowledge Durzak's identification of the song and procede with their own commentaries. Runzheimer does call it "das von Handke . . . übersetzte Lied," going beyond Durzak in the claim that Handke himself made the translation from the American original. Because to an American familiar with rhythm and blues it is impossible that the German text of "The Left-Handed Woman" be a translation or "deutsche(n) Version" of an authentic American text in that genre, I resolved to find out what actually was going on. Perhaps the English translation of Handke's story would provide the English-language original lyric. An English translation by Ralph Manheim was first printed in The New Yorker (7 November 1977), but there the song text is inexplicably [End Page 396] omitted. It is, however, included in the book edition of the same translation, which I quote here and throughout, rather than supplying the Handke original, of which it is a faithful translation: The Left-Handed Woman She came with others out of aSubway exit,She ate with others in a snack bar,She sat with others in a Laundromat,But once I saw her alone, reading the papersPosted on the...

The introduction traces Highsmith’s status in contemporary scholarship and her long adaptation history, starting with Hitchcock’s film version of her novel Strangers on a Train (1950). Strangers not only paved the way for nearly seven decades of Highsmith cinema (including works by renowned auteurs like Wim Wenders and Claude Chabrol), but it also started a long and difficult relationship between Highsmith and the medium of film. The chapter not only explores the consequences of Highsmith’s association with Hitchcockian cinema for her adaptation history, it also summarizes the author’s rather divergent reactions to adaptations made of her novels and introduces the structure of the book.

With the translation of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer in 1980, the visual medium of film becomes thematic, among other orientations that connect both authors. Even earlier, in a study of the painter Pongratz, Handke had emphasized that the “templates”/“Schemata” for writing and painting are comparable (EF 14; Mixner 1977, 172). The influence of the media of film and image subsequently shapes his writing in different ways. First, he establishes an adaptation of cinematic strategies since Die linkshändige Frau (The Left-Handed Woman) and an engagement with painting since Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire (The Lesson of Mount Sainte-Victoire). Secondly, he produces a text-determining and at the same time fundamental reflection on the relationship between the media of writing and image, as in Der Bildverlust (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos). This is differentiated in two ways: On the one hand, the intermedial relation of writing and image is complemented by the interaction of word and image; on the other hand in addition to the immediacy of the word, the visual perception itself becomes an issue. In this way, the concept of intermediality is redefined. Thirdly, the productive engagement with the medium of film gains a central role in Handke’s film adaptations of his own texts and in his collaboration with Wim Wenders. In turn, this determines the texts themselves, and Der Bildverlust in particular confirms this intermedial trace in the author’s work.

`It wasn't as good as the book' - this is the response to many a film adaptation, and even the starting point of many film reviews. Novel into Film is the first sytematic theoretical account of the process by which the great (and not so great) works of literature are transformed into the good, bad (sometimes ugly) but always distinctive medium of cinema. Drawing upon recent relevant literary and film theory, the book provides careful analysis of the theory and practice of metamorphosis. The Scarlet Letter, Random Harvest, Great Expectations, Daisy Miller and Cape Fear provide case studies which represent a range of fiction and cinematic practice. This book is intended for second and third year undergraduate students of literature, film studies, and cultural studies.

Susan Seidelman began her career at a unique moment when independent film production in the United States flourished within prominent film festivals and the ascendancy of home video. Coming of age professionally in the 1980s, Seidelman experienced the benefits of 1970s Hollywood feminist reform efforts, when the number of women directing narrative features increased for the first time since the silent era. In 1982, Seidelman’s first feature, Smithereens, became the first independent American film to screen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and was picked up by New Line Cinema. In the early-1980s, Barbara Boyle, production executive at Orion Pictures who was actively trying to hire women directors, signed Seidelman to a three-picture deal. By the end of the decade, Seidelman had made four female-driven comedies with themes of duality and the search for self-identity manifested through femme-themed production and costume design. Drawing on archival material not yet assessed, this chapter argues that the tenets of Seidelman’s auteurism stayed consisted throughout her career while situating her body of work within her origins as a New York-based filmmaker making smaller-budget studio films with women protagonists during a time when depictions of 1980s feminism were popularized in mainstream cinema.