CALL FOR PAPERS
It's a Mad World: The Work of Terry Gilliam
We seek essays of 4,000 to 8,000 words for an anthology that explores
the work of writer-actor-director-comedian Terry Gilliam. For decades
Gilliam has been a leading film auteur, both a comic and a social
critic, and a historical, critical survey of his work is needed.
While he has never wholly departed from his Monty Python roots, he has
forged his own distinct vision. Gilliam cinematically creates worlds
that are once familiar if unwelcome. He triumphs the mundane and the
absurd. His anachronistic and off-kilter vision consistently throws
off our ability to find a stable or common foundation on which to
ground our approach to his films.
This collection of transnational, globalized Gilliam studies envisions
understanding the intersection of our world and Gilliam's in new
cultural, historical, spatial, and epistemological frameworks: How
does cultural production of a globalized world, where everything is at
once local and international, fantasize a nostalgic return to a
monomythic state of order and symmetry even as it dehistoricizes the
globally industrialized military apparatus and competing ideologies of
individuality versus groupthink? How do Gilliam's (semi-) popular
narratives construct "England" and "America" in the context of a
globalized, dehumanizing, suffocating, and endless movement of goods
and services across international boundaries? How do his films
reconfigure spatial proximities of the United States, Great Britain
and the rest of the world? How do popular culture and globalized
business in their myriad forms mediate support for and/or dissent from
the current global situation?
We welcome submissions that focus on surrealism, politics, aesthetics,
absurdism, fantasy, or "Gilliamesque" influences on animation, etc.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• Monty Python and Film (e.g., The Life of Brian, The Holy Grail, etc.)
• Monty Python and Television (e.g., Flying Circus, Do Not Adjust Your Set.)
• Gilliam the Actor (e.g., The Life of Brian, Jabberwocky, Flying Circus)
• Gilliam the Director (e.g., Time Bandits, Baron von Munchausen,
The Fisher King)
• Gilliam and the documentary (e.g. Lost in La Mancha)
• Gilliam's illustration/animation, from Mad Magazine to his
television shows and filmography
• Commercial advertisements
• Auteur style
250-350 word abstracts, CV, by April 30, 2008 to:
Jeff Birkenstein, Ph.D.
Saint Martin's University
5300 Pacific Avenue SE
Lacey, WA 98503 / USA
[log in to unmask]
or
Karen Randell, Ph.D.
Southampton Solent University
East Park Terrace
Southampton, Hampshire
S014 OYN / United Kingdom
[log in to unmask]
or
Anna Froula, Ph.D.
English/Bate Building 2022
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858 / USA
[log in to unmask]
--
Iain Robert Smith
Institute of Film and Television
School of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
NG7 2RD
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