Literature of the Cinema: Novels into Film
Session Coordinator: Micki Nyman
Saint Louis University

Virginia Woolf’s Cinematic Palimpsest: Death of the Subject

In her 1926 essay entitled “The Cinema,” Virginia Woolf forsaw the movement of film toward its present day emphasis on emotional discourse. This emphasis is noted primarily in the intersection of forces constituting consciousness thereby redefining the unity of the subject, and can be witnessed as postmodern renderings of the metaphoric “death of the subject” in contemporary transpositions of Woolf’s works adapted from Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Orlando (1928). Woolf’s call for a new language of the cinema has been translated into a palimpsest of the death of the subject, meaning that, emotionality, adaptability, multiplicity of consciousness, and correspondences of life to death point to the subversion of out-moded systems of thinking, feeling, and living. This human adaptability surfaces textually in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando as well as intertextually in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Sally Potter’s Orlando (1998), Marleen Gorris’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002). Each draws upon correspondences of memory, emotions, affect, and action to assert that agency depends more upon the ongoing interaction of experiential elements in life and less upon adherence to a strict alignment of systems of thinking.

Micki Nyman
Saint Louis University

Who's Cabin?:  D.W. Griffith, Thomas Dixon, and Harriet Beecher Stowe

D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation is often recognized as a seminal text in American cinema history, inaugurating feature length movies and cementing the place of racial stereotypes in early film.  Yet, if viewed from a broader cultural perspective, Birth of a Nation can be seen as a moment in an ongoing dialogue over issues of race, nation, and rhetoric inaugurated by Uncle Tom's Cabin. Griffith's film was based on novels by Thomas Dixon that were themselves written to repudiate stage productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin were the most popular American stage play of the 19th and early 20th Century. Griffith's film attempt to reorient iconography made popular by various incarnations of Uncle Tom's Cabin (as novel, play, and film).  As with Thomas Dixon's novels, Griffith was responding to understandings of slavery, the South, and the Civil War for which Uncle Tom's Cabin proved a central touchstone.  In its representation of abolitionists, its rewriting of Reconstruction, and its re-articulation of the icon of the "cabin," Birth of a Nation is as much a rewriting of Uncle Tom's Cabin as it is an adaptation of Thomas Dixon's novels.

Jim O’Loughlin
University of Northern Iowa

The Dramatic Style of Henry James and the Gesture of Conversation  

Henry James’ novels have often been examined for their theatrical and dramatic elements. For example, it has been noted that the character Strether in The Ambassadors views his surroundings as a scene on a stage, as if James were providing notes to an imaginary director concerning a visual production of the novel. James worked out his novels as a “series of canvasses,” a prominent feature of his prose. Enamored with the theatre, he made several unsuccessful bids to become a playwright. He once observed, “I certainly wasn’t meant for the theatre.” He may, however, have been meant for the cinema. Upon examining his fiction and plays, one element of both becomes clear, the gesture of conversation, or his interplay between characters through the use of subtle glances. Because of the fourth wall between performer and audience, his shrewd understanding of gesture is nearly impossible to communicate on stage; yet it is clearly evident and effective in his novels, and is one of the reasons his work has been so successfully translated into film. This presentation will discuss James’ use of the gesture of conversation in several of his works, including those which have been successfully produced as film, particularly, Portrait of a Lady and Wings of the Dove.

Laurie A. Smith
Saint Louis University

The Restoration Roots of Modern Science Fiction and Horror

Although it is tempting to think of science fiction and horror as genres that have developed recently because of their extreme popularity, the roots of these genres spread deeply into our literary past. Even the epic poems have elements of strange species, such as the Sirens, and frightening, overwhelming events that precurse contemporary science fiction. By using the works of the Restoration authors Samuel Pepys, Horace Walpole, Margaret Cavendish, and Jonathan Swift, antecedent works by the later authors, and several scholarly articles written about the travel narratives of the nineteenth century, I will illuminate several Restoration works as the beginning of the modern, written record of the struggle to cope with forces and events beyond comprehension. These works, then and now, serve to confront the errors of science, such as the devastation of the Plague or the belief that the pole was the conjunction of our world and another world. They also reflect the need to understand new worlds and sentient beings, such as the five-year mission of the Starship Enterprise.

Sandra Olmsted
Saint Louis University