Associate Professor of English Dan Burns recently published an article and a book chapter on film adaptations of novels by Franz Kafka and James Baldwin, examining the cognitive and phenomenological dimensions of the viewing experience.
Dan Burns, former co-coordinator of the Global Film & Cultures minor and associate professor of English, published an article titled “Kafkan Attention and Distraction in Orson Welles’s The Trial” in the most recent volume of the Journal of Popular Film and Television. Burns’s article reexamines the 1962 adaptation of Jewish Czech author Franz Kafka’s German-language novel “The Trial” (1925) through the recent cognitive turn in Kafka scholarship. This critical approach explores how theories of perception, emotion and behavior shape the aesthetic experience of the modernist writer’s work.
The article analyzes the extent to which Welles’s technical innovations with mobile framing and disjunctive editing elicit a phenomenologically responsive mode of spectatorship that mirrors the reader’s engagement with Kafka’s prose. In this way, the essay argues that Welles’s adaptation both preserves and expands Kafka’s exploration of cognition under modernity’s crisis of attention.
Appearing in The Routledge Companion to James Baldwin, Burns’s book chapter, titled “Voice v. Vision: Adapting If Beale Street Could Talk Across Two Eras,” examines two adaptations of Baldwin’s influential novel, one unfinished and one completed decades later.
The first is Baldwin’s own screen treatment for Universal Studios, conceived alongside the book’s publication in 1974 but abandoned shortly thereafter. Available only among the author’s papers at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, this special collection includes production notes and studio correspondence that trace the project’s thwarted commercial development. Burns’s archival research at the Schomburg was supported by New Faculty Summer Research funding through the Provost’s Office.
The second is Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-winning 2018 feature, which translates Baldwin’s alternately rhapsodic and polemical prose into an intimate visual style. Read together, the two projects reveal how creative and cultural conditions shaped adaptations of the same literary work across distinct eras. Examining the director’s use of slow cinema aesthetics and gaze theory, the chapter argues that Jenkins’s visual treatment resolves—rather than reproduces—a supposed divide between the “two voices” of Baldwin’s narration.