Film as World Literature

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).

In the face of the predominantly Anglocentric studies of film adaptations of literature, Film as World Literature lives up to its title by delivering an exciting collection of eminently ‘worldly’ essays. The volume is especially valuable as it charts a conversation on the margins of major industries, countries, and topics. Not only does it show what became world-wide currents such as neo-realism, but it also explorescinema and media on the margins, ranging from mainstream commercial cinema (James Bond) to questions of evolving media technologies (the internationalization of screen culture through streaming apps).

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction (Robin Truth Goodman, Florida State University, USA)Part I. Language, Genre, Global Geographies1. 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 Culture6. 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-Garde10. 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. Mediations14. 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 ContributorsIndex