Hello all who happen to stumble onto this blog, be it other members of Prof. Hatfield’s English 312 Literature + Film class, Prof. Hatfield himself (Hi!), or anyone else for that matter. I guess the beauty of the modern technology age is that no souls are clandestine anymore; we truly are a tuned-on, plugged-in world fully committed to exposing our barest selves to strangers in the hope that there are others in the world who think and feel like us.
Well, for a bit about me: My name is Leslie Kawakami and I’m 23 years old. I’m a Junior at California State University at Northridge, hoping to graduate in the spring of 2012 if all goes to plan. I’m currently taking 5 courses: Major Critical Theories, Theories of Fiction, Asian American Fiction, Women’s Sex Roles in Culture and of course Literature + Film. I have to say the Lit + Film class is already looking to be the most entertaining and interesting, although that’s probably because the other classes involve lots of heavy, tricky readings by academic bigwigs who publish, it seems, simply in hopes of impressing the other academic bigwigs.
I must say that the main focus of this course being portal fantasies in children’s literature is just about the most fascinating and intriguing topic I could have hoped for. I took an Introduction to Film class at Santa Monica College a few years ago which I greatly enjoyed, so I’m hoping what I learned from that course will transfer and enhance my understanding of topics raised in this one. When I signed up for the course, I assumed we would be examining literature that’s been adapted to film (and possibly the stigma behind the opposite, those “dreaded” cheap paperback movie tie-ins that only seem to exist to boost the studio’s earnings) but I have fond memories of the stories I read as a child, and appreciate how much they exercised my imagination and stretched the limits of my understanding of the world. So, I’m deeply excited to pursue this topic in this course!
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Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press Ltd., 2000. Print. 60.
Leslie, thanks for this informative first post! Nice to hear about the background that brought you to 312.
ReplyDeleteIn our class, we'll all be bigwigs. It's just a matter of putting nose to grindstone and thinking hard and doing the work!
When designing 312, I had a choice of whether to focus entirely on the question of adaptation in an abstract way, or to select some kind of genre or theme that could give the class a bit more cohesion. I tried to split the difference, that is, to do something on a theme of interest (portals) and a genre I know (children's literature) but also to bring in the more general adaptation questions. This is why we'll be doing the Susan Orlean/Adaptation texts next week, even though they don't fit into the children's literature theme.