Rewriting Southern Literature for the Silver Screen (AUMLAC Feb 10-11 2012)

full name / name of organization: 
Robert Klevay / Auburn University at Montgomery
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This panel will celebrate the past and continuing inspiration of Southern literature on Hollywood film. In Film Adaptation and its Discontents, Thomas Leitch declares the "primary lesson of film adaptation" is "texts remain alive only to the extent that they can be rewritten and that to experience a text in all of its power requires each reader to rewrite it." He recommends that scholars concentrate on how a given adaptation "reads" its source text along with any "literary, cinematic, or broadly cultural" intertexts contained within rather than narrowly focusing on the issue of fidelity. Consequently, this panel will examine how the most successful screen adaptations of Southern Literature rewrite their source texts for an entirely new medium and encourage filmmakers to draw on additional "intertexts," such as illustrations, theatrical versions, famous actors' personas, preceding film or TV adaptations, related genre films, historical research, special effects technology, and changing audience expectations in their quest to entertain their viewers.

This panel is part of the Auburn University at Montgomery Liberal Arts Conference (AUMLAC) held annually in Montgomery, Alabama, and scheduled for Feb. 10 and 11, 2012. Proposals of 500 words or less should be sent electronically to rklevay@aum.edu by Oct. 9, 2011.