Film as World Literature

Redefines the theoretical and thematic contents of world literature by considering it in connection with film.
What gets lost when we understand film as essentially different from literature? What gets lost when we think them essentially the same? Does the constructed difference between literature and film also create social and political exclusions, exclusions that may exacerbate class struggle or exclusions of certain ways of thinking the future as different? Film as World Literature seeks to undo disciplines and disciplinarity: the division between film and literature, indeed, conceals the possibilities of "world" by bracketing out "undisciplined" parts.
Contributors apply ideas of "translatability" and "untranslatability" not just as a linguistic exercise of transfers between language groups, cultures, and national origins but also as an approach to media and transfers between media. Is film a visual acknowledgement that literary language is, by definition, multilingual - that is, is film a place where political conflicts, as Bakhtin observed, can be rendered visible? Chapters discuss film's relation to world literature not only by considering literary adaptations across nations, regions, languages, ideologies, and contexts but also by exploring film's intersections with literary theory, narrative, history, genre, and experimentation.
Film as World Literature calls for recognition that while the category of "world" demands a radical defense in the face of risks to democracy, the world that literature and film combined bring forth must interrogate the conditions for a future politics of interaction, engagement, belonging, and difference.

Robin Truth Goodman is a Distinguished Research Professor of English at Florida State University, USA. Her many previous publications include Cinema and the Political Imagination: Third Cinema and Its After-Image (2025), Gender Commodity: Marketing Feminist Identities and the Promise of Security (Bloomsbury, 2022), The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory (2019); Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt (2018); Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (2017); and Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (2016).

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction (Robin Truth Goodman, Florida State University, USA) Part I. Language, Genre, Global Geographies 1. World Cinema as Predicament: The Travels of Neorealism (Keya Ganguly, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA) 2. Coded by the Cold War: New Sensation Literature and the Cinema (Victor Fan, King's College London, UK) 3. Soviet Cinematic Shahnameh and World Heritage Cinema (Masha Salazkina, Concordia University, USA) 4. Stage, Screen, Subtitle: Layers of Translations in Hamaguchi's Drive My Car (Paul Couchana, Harvard University, USA) 5. From the Page to the Screen: Ousmane Sembene's Caméra-kaddu (Vlad Dima, Syracuse University, USA) Part II. Turns on Popular Culture 6. James Bond a Snob? - Sometimes; World Literature Film? - Always (Toby Miller, University of California, Riverside, USA, and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) 7. The Fate of Plot in the Streaming App (Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA) 8. "Demon! Demon! Demon!": The Strange Case of Mexico's Most Cultured Multimedia Wrestler (Paul Julian Smith, Graduate Center CUNY, USA) 9. Toward a Chromatic World Literature: Seeing and Hearing with Black Science Fiction (Blake Stricklin, University of Houston-Victoria, USA) Part III. Twists on the Avant-Garde 10. Cinematic Word Machines: Grove Press Pictures an Incurable World (Richard Baxstrom, University of Edinburgh, UK) 11. Revolutionary Possibilities: Vertov-Mayakovsky in the Global 1960s (Julia Alekseyeva, University of Pennsylvania, USA) 12. The Emotion of Particular Instants: Raul Ruiz's Literary Style (Felicity Gee, University of Exeter, UK) 13. The Power of the Dream: Connecting the Worlds of Early Cinema and Theater around 1900 Through the Works of Georges Méliès and August Strindberg (Scott MacKenzie, Queen's University, Canada, and Anna Stenport, University of Georgia, USA) Part IV. Mediations 14. Creaturely Worlding: Ali Abbasi's Adaptation of Border (Evren Özselçuk, University of South Carolina, USA) 15. The Bird That Eats Its Own Egg: Theorizing Subjectivity Through Climate Catastrophe (Robin Truth Goodman, Florida State University, USA) 16. Ressentiment as Refusal in Suleiman's Divine Intervention (Zahi Zalloua, Whitman College, USA) Notes on Contributors Index