ENGL 2234 Novel, Movie, Meme— Adaptations and Media Culture

General Information

Instructor: Dr. Erin MacWilliam ([email protected]) (Office: A324d)

Course Times: Tuesday / Thursday 12:30-2:20

Credits: 3 (for information about transfer credit, visit bctransferguide.ca) Course Description

What do Bridget Jones and Cher Horowitz have in common? Beside notable fashion and questionable paths to romance, both heroines owe their iconic appeal to the novels of Jane Austen and the adaptation of Austen’s free indirect discourse into sharp but often cringeworthy narrative voiceovers. Twenty-five years after its release, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, a film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma starring Alicia Silverstone, is still influencing the vocal and sartorial inflections of young adults, while the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice miniseries starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, released the same year, informed Helen Fielding’s classic chick lit novel Bridget Jones’ Diary, later to be a film starring, of course, Colin Firth. In 2021, what Austen created has become the inspiration for a #drunkausten hashtag and countless memes that bring Austen’s observations about social relationships into the internet age.

This course will explore the ways in which Austen’s novels continue to influence and produce what William Warner, writing on the effects of Richardson’s 1740 Pamela has described as “media culture,” where the extraordinary popularity of a text shifts not only taste, but the production and consumption of media itself. The eighteenth-century media culture of Pamela has become the twenty-first century internet culture of, among other forms, the meme, defined by Limor Shifman as not only a text, but a cultural practice embedded within digital culture. In this course we will read two essential Austen novels, Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Emma (1815), along with the novels, movies, and memes they inspired, analyzing these texts not only in their historical moment, but seeking to understand why they have become continually revisited pop cultural touchstones.

Course Texts

1. Selections from Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740 Novel) 2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813 Novel) 3. Simon Langton, dir. Pride and Prejudice (1995 BBC Miniseries) 4. Gurinder Chadha, dir. Bride and Prejudice (2004 Film) 5. Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’ Diary (1996 novel) 6. Sharon Maguire, dir. Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001 movie) 7. Jane Austen, Emma (1815 novel) 8. Amy Heckerling, dir. Clueless (1995 film) 9. Selections from the following Instagram hashtags and accounts: @janeaustenmeme, @excellent_boiled_potatores #janeaustenmeme, #drunkausten, 10. English 2234 Course package

*course texts are subject to change before the semester begins