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Engl 7396 Selected Topics section-Instructor: Lorraine K. Stock
Spring 2016
Tues, 2:30-5:30; room TBA
The Rhetoric of Adaptation:
Robin Hood in Text, Image, Sound, and Film
Course Philosophy:
The course mantra is: “Every generation gets the Robin Hood they desire and the Robin
Hood they deserve.” The seminar exploits the multimedia breadth of the medieval Robin
Hood legend, which supplies a laboratory for examining the process of adaptation from
text to text and in a variety of media including but not limited to film.
Fulfillment of Program Requirements:
The course materials’ vast temporal and generic range--including the medieval ballads
through Renaissance plays, 18th-century backstory ballads and chapbooks, 19th century
novels and poetry, 20th century fiction, operas, radio dramas, films, and TV, and 21stcentury young adult fiction, films and TV adaptations, product advertising, video games,
and other media of popular culture--qualifies the course as fulfilling categories in the
graduate curriculum including Early British Lit, Later British Lit, and the Rhet/Comp
requirement for “fusion” courses addressing the cultural institution of writing both in
“historical” terms and in terms of “writing practices.” The seminar’s multimedia focus
embraces an elastic definition of “writing” or “rhetoric.” Writing/rhetoric refers not only
to the traditional analysis of the rhetorical strategies employed by the authors of the
primary “texts” (printed/verbal literary texts) under consideration, but also to the
rhetorical strategies employed in the production of visual/aural “texts” in the Robin Hood
canon, such as book illustrations, oral/printed ballads, staged plays, operas, television
series, feature films, product advertisements in film and print, political propaganda, etc.
The student/critic’s analysis of such materials employs and produces yet another kind of
rhetorical “practice.”
Skill Sets Covered:
The seminar will ground the students in the major landmarks of film analysis discourse
and film criticism, theoretical writings about the adaptation process, and analysis of
visual rhetoric as well as provide a laboratory of written, aural, and visual texts about the
Robin Hood legend upon which to practice these forms of rhetorical analysis. Seminar
members will be encouraged to work on course projects that reflect their personal
disciplinary and literary-periodic interests. The field of materials reflecting the Robin
Hood legend is so vast that everyone should find “the Robin Hood they desire and the
Robin Hood they deserve” while producing the course’s required work products.
Why Robin Hood?
Robin Hood is a British legendary character whose narrative has been adapted into many
forms of high art and popular culture vehicles including: ballads, plays, dance, novels,
book illustrations, paintings, children’s literature, operas, musicals, television series,
feature films, fan fiction, TV commercials, political propaganda, etc. These range
chronologically through every major period in British and American culture: premedieval folklore about woodland deities; medieval ballads about a yeoman foresterturned outlaw; Anthony Munday’s 1598 plays inventing the gentrified Robert of
Huntington, Norman aristocrat-turned outlaw; 18th-century broadside ballads providing
back stories about how the “Merry Men” joined the outlaw band; Robin Hood-themed
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poems by the Romantic poets; Thomas Love Peacock’s 1822 novel Maid Marian; Alfred
Lord Tennyson’s 1892 play/opera The Foresters; Howard Pyle’s 1883 American
collection The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood; turn of the century American operas by
Reginald De Koven--Robin Hood (1890) and Maid Marian (1901); and 20th-century
popular fiction that reinvents the Robin Hood narrative for new audiences, whether in
kid-lit, young adult fiction or adult-targeted erotica. In the 20th-21st centuries there was an
explosion of feature films and television series too numerous to itemize, devoted to
exploring the Robin Hood legend, most recently 3 seasons of the BBC TV series, Robin
Hood (2006-09), and the 2010 Ridley Scott film Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe.
Robin Hood has become a protean cultural symbol that has been variously
appropriated by systems of authority as well as rebels against authority. Over time, the
legend has undergone reconstruction that reflected the immediate cultural needs of that
period. In the political sphere, Bernie Sanders is running on the “Robin Hood” tax for the
2016 election, following the identification of Barack Obama (2008) and Mitt Romney
(2012) with the British outlaw in previous election cycles. From her origins as a fertility
goddess, the May Queen, to her most recent film adaptations as a gutsy warrior woman,
reinterpretations of Maid Marian have mirrored the development of women’s history in
the 20th-21st centuries, turning a once passive damsel-in-distress into a second wave postfeminist, proactive female partner of (and sometimes superior to) Robin Hood. Moreover,
the use of cross-dressing, homosocial relations, and disguise and the emphasis on the
racial/cultural divide between Normans and Saxons in Robin Hood texts invite analysis
of the legend through the discourses of gender and race. A vast array of commercial
products are sold by means of print and film advertising that deliberately invokes the
Robin Hood “brand.” For interested students, the rhetoric of advertising can be explored
for class projects.
Primary Readings:
1. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997),
2. Thomas Love Peacock, Maid Marian (online source)
3. Alfred Tennyson, The Foresters: both play and opera by Arthur Sullivan (online
sources)
4. Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (NY: Dover, 1968).
5. Various online-linked texts or PDF files.
Secondary Readings:
1. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006),
complete.
2. Lester Faigley et al., ed. Picturing Texts (New York: Norton, 2004), selections.
3. Michael Petracca and Madeleine Sorapure, ed. Common Culture: Reading and
Writing about American Popular Culture (NJ: Pearson, 2004), selections.
4. Timothy Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing about Film (NY: Longman, 2010),
selections.
5. Various theoretical articles about film adaptation, film as spectacle, the star
system, etc. placed on Blackboard.
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Films: Selected film clips from the major films and television adaptations of the Robin
Hood story are available on Blackboard; complete films are available on reserve in the
library. Students may view and independently research lesser known films and TV from
the instructor’s personal collection.
Required Work Products:
1. A critical paper (6 pp.), due midway through the course, analyzing 2 adaptations
of the Robin Hood legend (text and other media) from a chronological point of
view or as cultural reflections of a particular chronological period.
2. A 1-page conference-paper abstract and a conference-length paper (10 pp.)
that deals with up to 3 examples of adaptation of the Robin Hood legend, due at
the end of the course. Papers will be presented at a mock conference that
concludes the course.
3. Students will post reflective written weekly responses to weekly readings and
media (and/or respond to their classmates’ reflections) in a blog on Blackboard.
Opportunities for Professionalizing Seminar Members:
1. The conference paper and abstract are products that students can submit to the
Popular Culture Association annual conference or other relevant local or national
conferences about adaptation, multimedia, medievalism, etc.
2. I am creating a website, Robin Hood in Culture, to be housed at UH, under
development. Student work from this course could contribute materials to the
website.