Preface

Summary

This book situates itself on the border of comparative literature and film studies. In recent years film studies has devolved into a somewhat insular possession, jealously guarded by its first colonists – if one can conceive of it as a country, it is a France whose capital is Metz – the generation that set up university film programs in the late sixties. Having once been compelled to fight clear of literature departments to secure their own existence, film programs are often averse now to recognition of the links between filmic and literary texts. Given film's status as the executor of the Gesamtkunstwerk's testament, film studies once promised to become an open forum for reflection upon the separate arts and cultural domains. Instead, once-exciting theories have been deprived of their speculative status and frozen into an orthodoxy that needs to be challenged in the name of the very theorists it takes as canonic: A Barthes or a Benjamin would surely have been appalled by his work's cooptation by the academy. All too often complacent orthodoxy speaks of difference and excludes anything that differs.