ENG3113: Movies as Narrative Art (Fiction and Film)
ENG3113 — Film as Narrative Art
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Course Description
ENG3113 is the film-as-narrative course taught from within an English department. The Statewide Course Numbering System titles it Movies as Narrative Art and sets out three concerns: "1. The movies as a mode of storytelling. 2. Verbal versus visual narration. 3. Contemporary thoughts and values reflected in film." The statewide prerequisite is an introduction to film course.
⚠ The second item is the intellectual core, and it is what distinguishes this course from a film studies course in a communication department. The question is comparative: what can a novel do that a film cannot, and the reverse? Interior thought, free indirect discourse and tense are native to prose and hard on screen; simultaneity, the unremarked detail in the frame, and the manipulation of duration are native to film and hard on the page. ⚠ Adaptation is the natural laboratory for that question, which is why these courses so often teach a novel beside its film.
Three Florida public universities carry it, ⚠ and one carries it at four credits:
| Institution | Its title | Credits |
|---|
| University of Florida | The Movies as Narrative Art | 4 |
| University of South Florida | Film as Narrative Art | 3 |
| University of West Florida | Fiction and Film | 3 |
Learning Outcomes
Required Outcomes
- Analyse a film's narrative structure — story and plot, order, duration, frequency — using the vocabulary of narrative theory.
- Identify and interpret the elements of film form: shot scale, camera movement, angle, lighting, colour, depth of field.
- Analyse editing — continuity and its violations, montage, rhythm — and explain what a cut does to meaning.
- Analyse sound: diegetic and non-diegetic, score, silence, and the relationship of sound to image.
- Explain point of view in film and how it differs from narrative voice in prose — ⚠ the central comparative problem of the course.
- Compare verbal and visual narration on specific tasks: rendering interiority, managing time, withholding information, conveying irony.
- Analyse an adaptation as an interpretation rather than as a more or less faithful copy.
- Apply mise-en-scène analysis to a single sequence in detail.
- Situate a film in its historical, industrial and cultural context, including the constraints of the production system that made it.
- Analyse how a film reflects or contests the values of its moment.
- Write a sustained analytical essay about a film, using specific evidence from the text, with correct MLA citation.
- ⚠ Write about what is on screen rather than about the plot — the distinction most first essays in this course fail on.
Optional Outcomes
- Apply critical approaches — genre, auteur, feminist, psychoanalytic, ideological — to film.
- Address world and non-Anglophone cinema.
- Address documentary and non-fiction narrative.
- Address serial television as long-form narrative.
- Address the industrial history of Hollywood and the studio system.
- Produce a short film or storyboard as a practical exercise.
- Address streaming and how distribution has changed narrative form.
Major Topics
Required Topics
- Narrative theory — story and plot, narration, focalisation, reliability; the apparatus applied to both media.
- Film form — cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound; the shot as the unit of analysis.
- Verbal versus visual narration — interiority, tense, metaphor, irony; what each medium does naturally and what it must work for.
- Adaptation — fidelity as a poor criterion; adaptation as interpretation; the problem of the "unfilmable" novel.
- Genre — conventions, expectations, and the pleasure of variation.
- Authorship — the auteur theory and its critics; collaborative production against the single author of a novel.
- Historical and industrial context — the studio system, censorship and the Production Code, independent and international production.
- Ideology and values — how films encode the assumptions of their moment, including the ones nobody noticed at the time.
- Writing about film — sequence analysis, evidence, and the conventions of the critical essay.
Optional Topics
- Critical approaches applied to film.
- World and non-Anglophone cinema.
- Documentary.
- Serial television.
- Practical production exercises.
- Streaming, distribution and form.
Resources & Tools
- Film Art: An Introduction by Bordwell and Thompson is the standard formal-analysis text and the source of most of the vocabulary this course uses.
- How to Read a Film by James Monaco is the common alternative and is broader in scope.
- A Theory of Adaptation by Linda Hutcheon is the standard reference for the comparative half — ⚠ and it is the book that argues most effectively against judging an adaptation by fidelity.
- ⚠ Access to the films is the practical constraint, and it is worth planning for. Assigned films may be on a streaming service you do not subscribe to. Check your library first: most Florida university libraries subscribe to Kanopy or Swank, which carry a great deal of assigned cinema at no cost to the student, and departments often place films on reserve.
- ⚠ Watch assigned films more than once. The first viewing is for story; the analysis happens on the second, with a notebook and a pause button. Students who watch once write plot summary, and plot summary is what loses marks in this course.
- The MLA Handbook for citation, including the conventions for citing a film and a specific timecode.
Career Pathways
- ⚠ Honest framing: this is an English course, not a film production course. It develops analysis and writing rather than craft, and a student who wants to make films should be taking production courses alongside it.
- Writer and Author (SOC 27-3043), Editor (SOC 27-3041), Technical Writer (SOC 27-3042).
- Secondary English Teacher (SOC 25-2031) with a teaching qualification — ⚠ film is increasingly taught in secondary English, and a teacher who can analyse it properly is unusual.
- Producer and Director (SOC 27-2012) and development roles — ⚠ script reading and development work is genuinely built on exactly this skill: reading a story critically and saying why it does or does not work.
- Postsecondary Teacher (SOC 25-1123), requiring a doctorate.
- Florida context: the state has a real production sector — ⚠ Miami is a substantial centre for Spanish-language television and commercial production, and Orlando's theme-park and simulation industries employ narrative and media staff. The marketing and content roles across the state's tourism economy hire graduates who can construct a story.
Special Information
Offering Notes — offerings and hours, school by school
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|
| University of Florida | The Movies as Narrative Art | 4 | not published |
| University of South Florida | Film as Narrative Art | 3 | not published |
| University of West Florida | Fiction and Film | 3 | not published |
All three are State University System institutions, so statewide numbering guarantees transfer between them.
⚠⚠ The University of Florida carries this at four credits where the other two carry three. The transfer guarantee moves the credit you earned; it does not convert three into four. ⚠ The likely reason is the screening: a film course frequently schedules a weekly screening block in addition to its seminar, and a four-credit listing may simply be honest about that. Either way, confirm with the receiving department — English majors carry distribution requirements that a credit mismatch can disturb.
⚠ The 45 contact hours at the top of this guide are derived for the three-credit version. ⚠⚠ They almost certainly understate the real commitment, because films are long: three hours of class plus a two-hour film each week is five hours, whether or not the screening is timetabled. Budget for the screening even where the schedule does not show it.
⚠ "Fiction and Film" is the broadest of the three titles
UF and USF both name film as the object — "The Movies as Narrative Art", "Film as Narrative Art". The University of West Florida's "Fiction and Film" puts prose fiction on an equal footing, which reads as a comparative course pairing novels with films throughout.
⚠ The statewide definition supports that reading directly — item 2 is "verbal versus visual narration", which is a comparison and cannot be done with films alone. So UWF's title is arguably the most faithful to the number, even though it is the outlier.
What it means practically: a "Fiction and Film" course has a substantial reading load as well as a viewing one. ⚠ Students who choose a film course expecting to escape novels should read the syllabus first — and students who want the comparative question should seek that version out, because it is the more interesting course.
The prerequisite, and whether it is enforced
The statewide prerequisite is an introduction to film course, which supplies the formal vocabulary — shot, cut, mise-en-scène — that this course uses from the first week. ⚠ Where it is not enforced, expect the opening weeks to cover that ground quickly rather than not at all, and if you are arriving without it, read the first chapters of Bordwell and Thompson before term starts. The vocabulary is learnable in a week; arriving without it and pretending otherwise is what costs marks.
Workload
Budget eight to ten hours a week including screenings. ⚠ The characteristic failure in this course is writing plot summary instead of analysis. An essay that recounts what happens has not engaged the course at all. The discipline is to analyse how — this shot, this cut, this sound choice — and the way to build it is to take notes on a second viewing with the film paused. Cite a timecode the way you would cite a page number.
AI Integration
Film is extremely well covered in online writing, so these tools are fluent about it — which makes them useful for context and unreliable for exactly the work being assessed.
Genuinely useful: providing historical and production context; explaining a technical term; identifying a film's place in a director's career or a genre's development; generating questions to test your own reading; drafting and tightening prose; and locating scholarship on a film.
⚠⚠ Where it fails, and the central failure is structural: a language model has not watched the film. It has read a great deal about films — reviews, plot summaries, criticism — which is precisely the material this course asks you to go beyond. ⚠ Ask for an analysis of a specific sequence and you will get plausible, general, frequently wrong description: invented camera movements, misremembered shot orders, cuts that are not there.
- Fabricated details and quotations — lines of dialogue misattributed or invented outright.
- Received opinion restated as analysis. The consensus view of a canonical film is exactly what a model reproduces, and exactly what a graded essay is meant to move past.
- Fidelity judgements in adaptation — models default to "the book was better", which is the position this course spends a term dismantling.
⚠ The test that settles it: a claim about a film must be checkable against the film. Cite the timecode and watch it. That single habit catches every failure above, and it is also what turns a plot-summary essay into an analytical one — which makes it the most useful thing in this section regardless of whether you use these tools at all.
Academic integrity: read your syllabus. The analytical essay is the assessment, and verifying your own claims against the film is both the integrity safeguard and the method.