Colleagues may be interested in the following call for symposia contributions. Respond directly to my colleague Michael Stewart, whose email address is noted below.
David Finkelstein
Research Professor of Media and Print Culture
School of Arts and Social Sciences
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
Queen Margaret University Drive
Musselburgh, East Lothian, EH21 6UU
tel.: 0131-474-0000
fax: 0131-474-0001
email: [log in to unmask]
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Symposium: Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television
Organisers: Text, Genre and Visual Studies Group, Media and Performing Arts, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.
Date: 29 October 2010.
Venue: Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.
Times: 9.30 – 5.30.
Melodrama is one of film and television’s primary historical, aesthetic and ideological modes, and it continues to be applied usefully and variously to film and TV texts. In cultural criticism broadly, however, there is still a tendency to think of melodrama as a domestic and at best diminished form. This symposium will consider the continued relevance of melodrama to contemporary and international texts, as well as the contested and changing meanings of the mode in film and television studies. The symposium is particularly interested in, but is not restricted to, the following themes:
· Genre, narrative and mise en scène
· Realism and neo-realisms
· Gender, sexuality and queer identities
· Adaptation, translation and the transcultural
· Region, nation and the post-national
· Memory, nostalgia and reclaimed histories
· Interdisciplinarity
· Cross-media forms
The symposium is free to attend and includes lunch, but places will be limited. Confirmed speakers include Gary Needham, author of Brokeback Mountain, EUP, 2010, and Glen Creeber, author of Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, BFI, 2004.
If you are interested in participating in the symposium, please send an abstract (approximately 200 words) of a proposed paper and brief biographical details to [log in to unmask] no later than 24th September 2010.