Independent Study (Faraday)

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Purpose

The independent study provides students the opportunity to practice self-directed learning in the study of literary and cinematic texts. The emphasis is on perfecting the process leading to the completion of an academic essay. Students are encouraged to concentrate on gathering, organizing, and selecting material appropriate to a final product.

Overview

The Independent Study counts for 20% of the course mark. In this project, you will read a novel and view its film adaptation. While reading and viewing, you will keep a portfolio including mindmaps, selected quotations, and other responses. Based on the ideas contained in the articles "Fiction into Film," "From Page to Screen," and "How Screenplays are Different from Novels" you will explore the many choices that must be made by a director when transforming a print text to a visual text. After investigating the novel and the movie, you will then brainstorm, draft, and write a formal, academic paper in which you first examine the exploration of an issue in the novel, then discuss the effect of the director's choices on the film viewer's experience in relation to the issue. Finally, you will present some of your conclusions to your classmates using clips from the film and passages from the novel.

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Process Flowchart