English 391
Jane and Henry in
Spring 2007
Prof. David Richter
Term Paper Instructions
The major written work for this course is one term paper of 12-20 pages (more if necessary).
Term papers have a topic and a thesis about that topic. You get to choose the topic, although it should conform to the subject-matter of this course, which is Film Adaptations of the Novels and Stories of Jane Austen and Henry James. (Television miniseries counts as film, for our purposes.)
If you want to work on film adaptations of works by a different author or authors, I would hope that the texts would be in something like the tradition of Austen and James. (In other words, an adaptation of novels by E.M. Forster or Virginia Woolf would work for me but not something like Gone with the Wind or Lord of the Rings or The Passion of the Christ.)
As I have mentioned, there are translations (which can attempt to be more or less literal), adaptations (which may be updated or otherwise shifted into a different cultural space), and what might be called imitations (films that are inspired and shaped by a literary text without being an attempt to fully render that text – for example, Sharon Maguire’s film adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) moves Helen Fielding’s novel, set in contemporary London, into the orbit of Pride and Prejudice; and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), set in New York, which does the same for Austen’s Mansfield Park.
Your thesis can involve one film or more than one film. Compare and contrast is one good strategy, and you will find on the filmography (pp 3-6 of the syllabus at http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/ENGLISH/Staff/richter/391.pdf ) all the film adaptations of Austen and James I know about, including some competing versions we will not have screened in class.
Or you may want to work on the career of a particular director or writer who has made several adaptations -- for instance, director James Ivory has made adaptations of James’s The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), and The Golden Bowl (2000).
The thesis is also up to you, although I would like to review and okay (or reject) your theses in advance. If you want to critique your thesis before you send it up to me for my own critique, you will find help at my friend Jack Lynch’s page about developing a thesis, at his website: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/EngPaper/thesis.html See particularly what Jack calls the “Well, duh!” test. His page contains links to other sites with pointers about academic writing that are very helpful. One of those wonderful sites is that created by Dan White and Jeannine DeLombard from the Erindale campus of the University of Toronto – it has all you need to know about planning, writing, citation of sources, and revision. http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/~dwhite/papers.htm
One special problem for this class may be “quoting” a movie, which involves clipping a single frame from a DVD to illustrate your thesis. You can do this by downloading a program called PowerDVD, which will play a DVD on your computer, and which has a “screen capture” feature that will copy a still picture to your hard disk. See http://classweb.gmu.edu/tec/video/powerdvd/PDstill.html for information on the process. This is by no means the only way of doing this.
All papers are due May 21. Please submit an e-copy of the paper (send me the paper as email, to drichter@nyc.rr.com ), whether or not you submit a hard copy of the paper. Late papers will be accepted, but I plan to be out of the country in late May, so there may need to be incompletes and make-up grades. If you are graduating this term, this may not be an option you will want to exercise.
I will be posting this file to the website. If you have questions, I will try not only to answer them but also to revise this file to make it clearer.