Literature and Film: Marking Out Some Boundaries

A casual though reasonably accurate totalling of the courses taught by different departments discloses that 293 colleges offer film courses under Speech/Drama/Communication; 135 have basically separate departments of Radio/TV/Film; 25 assign the courses to Journalism; 88 include them under Art or Fine Arts; 33 are in Education; but the very significant number of 139 list film as being primarily taught as English or occasionally Modern Language or Humanities courses.1 If approximately one fourth to one fifth of the film courses in higher education curriculums are under language departments, one may well ask what exactly is being taught in them. Naturally, plays, novels, stories which have been transformed into films provide reason for study either to make a comparison of the two versions, perhaps to determine the way the narrative or dramatic form works in another medium, or to use the film as a teaching device for the literary work But the question of a separate rhetoric for film arises at once.