Performing Dickens: "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations" on Page, Stage, and Screen

FAIN: FS-50344-13

Regents of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077)
John O. Jordan (Project Director: March 2013 to December 2014)

A four-week seminar for sixteen college and university faculty to explore two of Charles Dickens's novels and their theatrical and cinematic adaptations, to be held at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Performing Dickens seminar will examine Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, two of Dickens’s most often taught and most frequently adapted novels, along with a range of important film, television, and dramatic adaptations from 1837 to 2012. The seminar will place Dickens in theatrical context, discussing his many connections to the stage: both the theater’s profound effect on his art (he wrote while acting out his characters in front of a mirror) and his vital effect on Victorian performance practice (through collaboration with playwrights and wildly successful reading tours). It will also ask more broadly how adaptations and performances interpret their source texts and affect their meaning. Many of these film and stage adaptations have become classics in their own right. College and university teachers of literature, theater, film, performance, and adaptation studies will benefit from this seminar on performing Dickens as they work on their own related projects.