TEACHING

I teach mainly eighteenth-century literature, and more specifically the uses of the eighteenth century in cinema. During the course of my masters seminar, we look at theories of adaptation, at discourse on cinema, as well as at transpositions of historical periods. We analyse parallel scenes from films and novels to understand different modes of representation (we are not interested in ideas of the “authentic”…).

In 2015-6, we studied:

• Adaptations of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (we looked at various adaptations, in particular the Fleischers’ animated film of 1939);
• Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963);
• And the adaptations of Jane Austen's Emma (1991)

It was understood that everyone had read the novels on which these films were based, so as to allow discussion.

This gives us an insight both into “canonical” novels of the eighteenth century, and their possible uses in different visual genres.

In 2016-7, we studied:

• Tony Richardson’s Joseph Andrews (1977) and Tom Jones (1963);
• Michael Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story (2005), which is a cinematic translation of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and of the complexities of telling a story in a straight line;
• Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975)an adaptation of Thackeray’s novel published in the nineteenth but set in the eighteenth century.

In the second semester we studied postcolonial literatures reading in particular the following:

• Matar, Hisham. In the Country of Men. London: Viking-Penguin, 2006,
• Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. London: HarperCollins, 2004.
• Shamsie, Kamila. Burnt Shadows. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.

In 2017-8, the first semester is devoted to the following:

• Adaptations ofRobinson Crusoe. un particular Luis Bunuel’s.
• Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963);
• And the adaptations of Jane Austen'sPride and Prejudice.

And the second semester to:

• Coetzee, J.M. Foe. [1986] London: Penguin, 2010.
• Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. London: HarperCollins, 2004.
• Naipaul, V.S. A Bend in the River. [1979] London: Picador, 2011.

I co-convene a postgraduate seminar in postcolonial theory.

Over the years I have taught, and still supervise, on theories of fiction, linguistic analysis of literary discourse, contemporary British fiction and on a variety of authors ranging from Shakespeare from Burney Conrad to Kureishi, etc.