Prof. Saviour Catania

Prof. Saviour Catania

Prof. Saviour Catania

  B.A.,B.A.(Hons),M.A.,Ph.D.

Professor

Room 419
University of Malta
Msida
  +356 2340 3944
I obtained my Ph.D in English Literature from the University of Malta with a thesis entitled A Thematic-Semiotic Comparison of Five Wuthering Heights Film Adaptations. My main areas of research are Film Appropriations and Film Theory with a special focus on foreign film versions of English literary works.

My most recent publications include Truth Beauty as Waking Dream: Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Mystic Oxymoron of Keats' Poetry (Literature/Film Quarterly 40.1, 2016); Ferrying Nothingness: The Charon Motif in Murnau's Nosferatu and Dreyer's Vampyr (Melita Classica 3, 2016); The Undying Light: Yoshida, Bataille and the Ambivalent Spectrality of Brontë's Wuthering Heights published in The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Signifying Nothing: Bresson's Lancelot du Lac and the Arthurian Paradoxism of Tennyson's Idylls (Merope: 23. 59/60, 2014). I have also published articles in Brontë Studies, Entertext, Literature/Film Quarterly, Merope and Studia Filmoznawcze and contributed book chapters to the anthologies Adapting Poe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Shared Waters (co-authored/Rodopi, 2009) and World-Wide Shakespeares (Routledge, 2005). I am currently working on transcultural appropriations of Wuthering Heights on film including El Sheikh's Al Gharib, Kardar's Dil Diya Dard Liya, Fazil's Dehleez, and Siguion-Reyna's Hihintayin Kita Sa Langit.

I was the lecturer to introduce Film Studies at the University of Malta. The film units I introduced include not only Development of Film Language and Classical and Contemporary Film Theory (within the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences) but also Medieval Literature into Film, Shakespearean Film, and Modern and Post-Modern Novel into Film (within the Department of English, Faculty of Arts). I am also a principal lecturer within the Interdepartmental Masters Programme in Literary Tradition and Popular Culture and the highly innovative Masters Programme in Film Studies developed by Prof. Gloria Lauri Lucente. Within these programmes I lecture together with Prof. Lauri Lucente on Film Technology and the Literary Canon and Film Adaptation, the Literary Tradition and Other Arts.
  • Film Theory and Film Adaptation

Catania, S. 2016, "The Dreaming Dead: Noirish Spectres of Hamlet in Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well", Merope, vol. 25, no. 64, pp. 5-25.

Catania, S. 2016, "Ferrying Nothingness: The Charon Motif in Murnau's Nosferatu and Dryer's Vampyr", Melita Classica, vol. 3, pp. 125-139.

Catania, S. 2016, "'Truth Beauty' as 'Waking Dream': Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Mystic Oxymoron of Keats' Poetry;", Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 19-33.

Catania, S. 2014, "Signifying Nothing: Bresson's Lancelot du Lac and the Arthurian Paradoxism of Tennyson's Idylls", Merope, vol. 23, no. 59-60, pp. 175-197.

Catania, S. 2014, "The Undying Light: Yoshida, Bataille and the Ambivalent Spectrality of Brontë's Wuthering Heights" in The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds, eds. S. Qi & J. Padgett, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 169-190.

Catania, S. 2012, "An Ambrosial Breath of Faery’: Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la Maison Usher and the Inverted Orphism of Poe’s ‘Poetic Principle'" in Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in Popular Culture, eds. D.R. Perry & C.H. Sederholm, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 45-58.

Catania, S. 2012, "Filming Brontë's 'Ghostly Absence': Kosminsky's Wuthering Heights as a Cinefantastic Text", Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 20-27.

Catania, S. 2012, "The Hanging Rock Piper: Weir, Lindsay, and the Spectral Fluidity of Nothing", Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 84-95.

Catania, S. 2011, ""Landscape Living": Yoshida’s Arashi-ga-Oka and the Frost/Fire Heart of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights", Brontë Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 248-256.

Catania, S. & Callus, I. 2009, "The Otherless Other, or the Anonymity of Water: Unmapping Ondaatje's 'Sand Sea' Self in Minghella's The English Patient" in Shared Waters: Soundings in Postcolonial Literatures, ed. S. Borg Barthet, Rodopi, Amsterdam, pp. 229-243.

Catania, S. 2008, "“‘Darkness Rumbling’”: Kozintsev’s Karòl Lier and the Visual Acoustics of Nothing", Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 85-93.

Catania, S. 2008, "Wagnerizing Wuthering Heights: Buñuel’s Tristan Storm in Abismos de Pasión", Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 272-280.

Catania, S. 2006, "Wailing Woodwind Wild: The Noh Transcription of Shakespeare’s Silent Sounds in Kurosawa’s Ran", Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 85-92.

Catania, S. 2005, "The Haiku Macbeth: Shakespearean Antithetical Minimalism in Kurosawa’s Kumonosu-jo" in World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. S. Massai, Routledge, London, pp. 149-156.

Catania, S. 2004, "Absent Presences in Liminal Places: Murnau's Nosferatu and the Otherworld of Stoker's Dracula", Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 229-236.

Catania, S. 2004, "To Unveil and/or to Mask: Buñuel's and Yoshida's Revisioning the Religious Theme in Wuthering Heights", Studia Filmoznawcze, vol. 25, pp. 65-81.

Catania, S. 2002, "'The Beached Verge': On Filming the Unfilmable in Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet [online]
", EnterText, [Online], vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 297-311.

Catania, S. & Bianco, L. 2002, "L'Année Dernière à Marienbad and the Cartography of an Orphic Life-in-Death: The Modern Katábasis of Resnais", Melita Theologica, vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 81-100.

Catania, S. 2000, "Cinematising the Euripidean and Sophoclean Spatial Dialectics: On the Skene-Self in Pasolini’s Medea and Edipo Re", Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 170-179.

Catania, S. 1999, "Filming Brontë's Moorish Soundscape: An Aural Analysis of Five Wuthering Heights Film Adaptation", Humanitas: Journal of the Faculty of Arts, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 21-36.

  • ATS5002 - Film, Technology and the Literary Canon
  • ATS5025 - Image and Sound: An Introduction to Film Analysis
  • ATS5039 - Methods of Research: Critical Approaches to Film Studies
  • ATS5080 - Celluloid Balloons: Film Adaptations of Comics & Comic Book Adaptations of Films, from the Silent Era to the Digital Age
  • ATS5102 - Film Adaptation, the Literary Tradition and the Other Arts
  • ENG2068 - Medieval Literature into Film
  • ENG2071 - Shakespeare into Film
  • ENG3072 - Contemporary Fiction
  • ENG3086 - Horror
  • ENG3372 - Modern and Post Modern Fiction into Film
  • MCS2010 - Development of Film Language
  • MCS3201 - Film Theory
  • SPA2107 - Spanish Film
  • SPA2207 - Latin American Film
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