A decade before becoming famous for his prose narratives, W.G. Sebald worked on two film projects that remained unrealized in his lifetime and have not yet been extensively studied. These intended films were to focus on the lives of two philosophers, Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but Sebald only tangentially engages with their philosophical work. Instead, the film scripts consist of biographical sketches and, in the case of the Wittgenstein project, images. A closer look at these two projects reveals Sebald in a transitional phase in his development from academic to literary author. The works bear similarities to the style and themes for which he later became known: intertextuality, the pitfalls of human progress, and death. The Wittgenstein project also marks a starting point for Sebald’s interest in characters who bear a resemblance to the philosopher, which would persist throughout his literary career.

This chapter offers readings of Kazuo Ishiguro’s screenplays, paying particular attention to two films commissioned by Channel 4, A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (1984) and The Gourmet (1986), and to his collaboration with Merchant Ivory, The White Countess (2005). In these rarely discussed works, Ishiguro interrogates the form of film itself by drawing attention to ‘unfilmable’ aspects of experience such as memory and imagination, which also feature prominently in his novels and short stories. While often overlooked in critical examinations of his work, these films provide insights into Ishiguro’s creative process and the evolution of his recurrent themes more generally. Like his most renowned novels, the subjects of these screenplays are service, sacrifice, and self-deception.

This chapter reports a thirteen-week action research project that was conducted with sixty-seven first-year non-English-major students taking a mandatory general English course in a Chinese state university. Using English professional screenplays as the source of authentic conversations, we designed and implemented an intervention that enabled the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students to consider how the realisation of a speech act is mediated by a range of contextual factors. We achieved this by: (1) selecting screenplay extracts that reflect varied communication situations, (2) using conversation analysis and Hymes’ () SPEAKING model as guiding frameworks, (3) combining awareness-raising tasks with explicit instruction and (4) setting up weekly group work. From two iterative cycles of research, the following qualitative data were collected: (1) two open-ended questionnaires, (2) audio recordings of classroom interaction, (3) our own observation and reflective notes and (4) the conversations and self-reflection created by the students each week. The results show that English screenplays helped to develop the Chinese EFL students’ metapragmatic awareness by providing rich conversational, social and literary contexts to a speech act. The screenplays also enabled the students’ resourcefulness as social actors, fans of pop culture or creative individuals in their interpretation and formulation of varied second language (L2) speech acts. This holds implications particularly for EFL teachers in challenging circumstances such as the one where this study took place: large class sizes, limited class time and students having only limited access to naturally occurring English conversations. The findings also hold implications for the establishment of an interactional learning space facilitated by English screenplays and teacher scaffolding.