Lecture (LEC)

• COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inq

• COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
• Above class meets with ENG-L 373

A purveyor of sin, a champion of liberation, a narcissistic celebrity¿How does one character evolve over centuries to mean so many different things yet still be ¿the same¿ character? How does a creative artist renovate an old story for new audiences? Adaptation is one of the most productive forms of creativity as artists choose to start not with a blank screen but with preexisting material to reshape through their unique talents for a new generation. Adaptation can take place within one medium, as when Hollywood remakes a classic film, and across different media, as when a published poem is translated into music, then choreographed for the stage, then transformed into a series of photographs. Over the course of the semester we will watch artists engage with each others¿ work and synthesize those works through their own skills, tastes, and goals to create something new that still echoes its predecessors. Our multimedia experience will embrace stage plays, lyric poetry, painting, dance, opera, orchestral music, photography, and film, including silent film and film noire¿a semester of storylines as diverse as deadly mothers and daughters, dancing sexualities, and a talking corpse in a swimming pool. We will track the character Salome from brief glimpses of her in the Christian Gospels to Oscar Wilde¿s scandalous play in which she takes center stage, to the decadent paintings of her by Gustave Moreau, into the seductive opera by Richard Strauss which uses Wilde¿s script as its libretto, and finally the American film noir Sunset Boulevard in which a forgotten movie star imagines Salome as her ideal revenge on Hollywood. We will also track the character Electra through the plays by ancient Greece¿s three most famous dramatists, as they compete with each other to tell her story in their own ways¿a character so sensational that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung misuse her story to express their views on women¿s psychology, and Richard Strauss will compose an Electra opera that remains one of his most performed works more than a hundred years after its debut. Workload: weekly reading, class attendance, and participation, two analytical essays, one in-class presentation, profile of an adaptation. Any interested person is welcome, regardless of major, as long as they have completed the IU General Education English composition requirement. Reading list: the Electra plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; Oscar Wilde¿s banned play Salome; libretti for Richard Strauss¿s operas Salome and Electra; Billy Wilder¿s screenplay for Sunset Boulevard. For more course information: jwjohnso@iu.edu