Comparative Cinema: Late and Last Things in Literature and Film

by Paul Coates

Transplants into Film Studies the protocols and procedures of Comparative Literature

Offers an original theory of the relationship between comparatism and the sense of ending, with particular reference to theories of modernism, abstraction, quotation and randomization

Theorizes the emergence of cinema as a ‘late thing’ in the histories of society, the mind, the arts and the senses

Presents a wide international range of literary and filmic texts, both occidental and oriental, that raise the question of ending in various ways

Affords a uniquely dialectical consideration of the relationship between intertextuality, intratextuality and intermediality

Provides an original contribution to adaptation studies that has relevance to other fields also, particularly aesthetics and philosophy

Maps the relationship between texts’ endings or endlessness, and figures of escape, the labyrinth, the ruin, the double, and dusk

257 pages, Hardcover

Published May 11, 2021

About the author

Paul Coates is a professor emeritus of film studies at Western University, Ontario. Previously, he taught at Georgia, McGill, and Aberdeen, and his books include The Story of the Lost Reflection (1985), The Gorgon’s Gaze (1991), Lucid Dreams: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski (ed., 1999), Cinema and Colour (2010), Screening the Face (2012), and Comparative Cinema: Late and Last Things in Literature and Film (2021).