Film Theory: An Introduction

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In 2009, he was named a Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton, where he presented a paper on "The Red Atlantic". Stam's later work in literature and film formed part of and helped advance the field of adaptation studies, which has been undergoing a boom since the turn of the 21st century. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous.

Para mim, o grande diferencial do livro é que a cada capítulo e teoria, o Stam primeiro apresenta sua principal ideia, faz você achar ela brilhante, para logo em seguida mostrar as críticas a ela, fazer você pensar que as críticas tem razão, e aí ao fim ele também se posiciona sobre o assunto. Representation, Meaning, and Experience in the Cinema: A Critical Study of Contemporary Film Theory. Two anthologies co-edited with Alessandra Raengo (both published by Blackwell) fleshed out the project: Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005), and Companion to Literature and Film (Blackwell, 2004). Attempting to go beyond the methodological limitations of the then-dominant paradigm of “positive image” and “negative stereotype” analysis, Stam argued for an approach that emphasized not social accuracy or characterological merits but rather issues such as perspective, address, focalization, mediation, and the filmic orchestration of discourses. Unthinking Eurocentrism addressed such issues as “Eurocentrism versus Polycentrism,” “Formations of Colonialist Discourse,” “The Imperial Imaginary,” “Tropes of Empire,” the “Esthetics of Resistance,” “postcolonial hybridity,” and “indigenous media.Still, Bakhtin is perhaps the most quoted theorist here so Stam inevitably managed to include some sections on him that I found satisfying.

Anyway, I found myself skimming over the post-silent sections of the book and only reading long passages when Stam hit on an area that I was particularly interested in. Another field of intervention for Stam has been in cultural theory, especially in Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Johns Hopkins, 1989), the first book-length study to extrapolate for film and cultural studies Bakhtin's conceptual categories, such as “translinguistics” and “dialogism” and the “carnivalesque.C. Berkeley in 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since.