MONSTROUS MEDIA / SPECTRAL SUBJECTS
INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC ASSOCIATION 9th BIENNIAL CONFERENCE
LANCASTER UNIVERSITY
21st - 24th JULY 2009
SESSION CALL FOR PAPERS
MONSTROUS HYBRIDS: GOTHIC / SCIENCE FICTION
From Frankenstein to The Ghosts of Mars, Gothic and Science Fiction
modes
have always mixed, merged, overlapped and doubled eachother. This
session
invites papers that explore the boundaries between the two modes and
their
productive interactions. Sharing technologies of creation and
representation,
ideologies of otherness and the uncanny, psychologies of paranoia and
psychosis, and tropes of anachronism and repetition, they share also a
mixed
progeny of texts and concerns. How have these texts (in literature,
film,
television, art, fashion and music) encountered, explored, and engaged
with
interminglings of Gothic and Science Fiction? How do we read texts,
technologies and historical moments that constitute points of exchange
between them? What new imaginings and possibilities of monstrous media
and
spectral subjectivities do Gothic and Science Fiction offer each other?
Areas for consideration might include (but are not restricted to):
* forms and effects of generic blurring, merging and confusion in
specific Gothic / SF texts, traditions and media;
* 'the unknowability thesis' (Jameson), the uncanny, and shared
epistemological problems in Gothic and SF;
* Gothic / SF technologies, biologies and ideologies;
* Gothic / SF bodies, genders, becomings and othernesses;
* Gothic / SF crossovers in subcultures, fads, histories,
celebrities;
* Divergent or convergent tropes of dystopic vision, disaster and
apocalypse in Gothic / SF traditions.
Proposals (250 words) are invited for papers or presentations (20
minutes)
that offer critical and theoretical readings to develop understandings
of the
relations between Gothic and Science Fiction. Submission deadline 5th
January
2009.
Please contact John Sears at [log in to unmask]
|