Cinema in Fiction: How to Read Films in Novels

The workshop is an introduction to the relationship between cinema and literature with the focus on textual representations of films in novels. In its first half, the workshop will briefly cover the history of novels’ engagement with cinema, drawing upon several prominent examples, and will open to speculation about possible interpretations of films in fiction. Additionally, the workshop will introduce various methods of analysing such a phenomenon through the approaches developed by literary studies and studies in intermediality.

The second part of the workshop will be dedicated to discussing a chapter from Jonathan Coe’s novel Number 11 (2015) – The Crystal Garden – a short story about a person who sees a film as a child and consequently becomes obsessed with it as an adult. The chapter offers various examples of the film’s representation, and the discussion will focus on the questions of forms of the film’s representation, the roles the film plays on the level of style and narrative construction, and the meaning that the film creates in the context of the chapter.
 
The target audience comprises Bachelor, Master, and PhD students of film, literature, culture studies, or any other disciplines who are interested in but have no specific background knowledge of the practice of literary representation of film medium.

Please, access the novel via the Internet Archive: you will need to register and log in in order to borrow the book for an hour (you can always renew the loan after the first hour expires). Please, read Chapter 3 called "The Crystal Garden" (pp. 127 - 177), and think of a) how (in which forms) the film is represented in the chapter and b) what role the film plays in the storyline of the chapter.

Click here to get to the novel in the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/number11ortalest0000coej_g9h2/mode/2up

// Anna Klishevich