Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
When Stories Travel
Cross-Cultural Encounters Between Fiction and Film
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
Adapting fiction into film is, as author Cristina Della Coletta asserts, a transformative encounter that takes place not just across media but across different cultures. In this book, Della Coletta explores what it means when the translation of fiction into film involves writers, directors, and audiences who belong to national, historical, and cultural formations different from that of the adapted work.
In particular, Della Coletta examines narratives and films belonging to Italian, North American, French, and Argentine cultures. These include Luchino Visconti's adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Federico Fellini's version of Edgar Allan Poe's story "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," Alain Corneau's film based on Antonio Tabucchi's Notturno indiano, and Bernardo Bertolucci's take on Jorge Luis Borges's "Tema del traidor y del h roe."
In her framework for analyzing these cross-cultural film adaptations, Della Coletta borrows from the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and calls for a "hermeneutics of estrangement," a practice of mediation and adaptation that defines cultures, nations, selfhoods, and their aesthetic achievements in terms of their transformative encounters.
Stories travel to unexpected and interesting places when adapted into film by people of diverse cultures. While the intended meaning of the author may not be perfectly reproduced, it still holds, Della Coletta argues, an equally valid and important intellectual claim upon its interpreters. With a firm grasp on the latest developments in adaptation theory, Della Coletta invites scholars of media studies, cultural history, comparative literature, and adaptation studies to deepen their understanding of this critical encounter between texts, writers, readers, and cultural movements.
About the Author:
Cristina Della Coletta is a professor of Italian and associate chair of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. She is author of World's Fairs Italian-Style: The Great Expositions in Turin and Their Narratives and Plotting the Past: Metamorphoses of Historical Narrative in Modern Italian Fiction.
Press Reviews:
Della Coletta presents an interesting examination of cross-cultural adaptations of fiction to film... this study is an excellent resource for those interested in adaptation studies.
— Choice
See the publisher website: Johns Hopkins University Press
> On a related topic:
The History of German Literature on Film (2025)
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
Retelling Jane Austen (2024)
Essays on Recent Adaptations and Derivative Works
Dir. Tammy Powley and April Van Camp
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
English Classics in Audiovisual Translation (2024)
Dir. Irene Ranzato and Luca Valleriani
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
Hemingway and Film (2024)
Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding
Dir. Cam Cobb and Marc K. Dudley
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
Film Adaptations of Russian Classics (2024)
Dialogism and Authorship
Dir. Alexandra Smith and Olga Sobolev
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
But Have You Read the Book? (2023)
52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
Back
