Literary Remakes

Literature creates new worlds — and it recreates old ones. From Dante to Steinbeck, The Lord of the Rings to Clueless, writers are constantly rewriting stories. In this class, we will read some literary remakes and discuss what is at stake, and what is opened up, through adaptation and renewal. We will watch film adaptations and listen to song covers. Often, literary remakes give voice to characters from underrepresented demographics; we will discuss the pros and cons of these attempts, and we will attempt to create some of our own remakes. Texts will include selected poems written "after" other poems, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (King Lear)/, /Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Jane

Eyre)/, /James by Percival Everett (Huckleberry Finn)/.





/Claire Hodgdon is a Brooklyn-based nonfiction writer with a BA from Middlebury and an MFA from Columbia. Her work has appeared in Teen Vogue, Electric Literature, Longreads, and elsewhere./