In addition to a sizeable MHSoC contingent at this year’s SCMS conference (post coming soon), this term our graduate students will also be presenting their works at conferences all over Canada and the US! Check out brief descriptions of their talks below.
Cinema and Television: A Graduate Colloquium
University of Toronto, February 8-9, 2013
Jesse Balzer – “Raw Twitter: WWE and Television Spectatorship”
Jesse’s presentation will focus on the ways in which Twitter has been used to reshape pro wrestling spectatorship via polls which determine the featured segments or matches on its live flagship program, Monday Night Raw. He argues that the interactivity generated by WWE has not fundamentally altered the core narrative and stylistic grammar of the pro wrestling genre, despite the appearance of a more democratic engagement with the show.
Juan Llamas Rodriguez – “Seriality and Medium Emergence in Film and Television”
In this paper, Juan will address ongoing discourses that use seriality as a distinguishing characteristic between cinema and television, by looking back at the role that serials had in each medium’s early years. This paper will ask whether seriality can inform medium specificity in either of these distinct historical contexts or in the present era.
Labyrinths: Navigating Complexity Across the Humanities
McGill University, February 15-17, 2013
Adam Szymanski – “The labyrinth of cinema’s free indirect subjective”
In this conference talk, Adam will analyze the labyrinthine qualities of the cinematic free indirect subjective image and how the technique of the free indirect subjective (the cinematic equivalent – or the closest equivalent that exists – to the literary use of free indirect discourse/speech) is a foundational formal technique for expressing the psyche through cinema. His presentation will suggest a manner of thinking about the psyche – and by extension madness and mental illness – through films that employ a free indirect ‘poetic’ aesthetic rather than film narratives about the psyche and its disturbances.
Jordan Kaufman – “Immersion Television: Migrating Audiences In Between Multiple Media Boundaries”
Jordan’s paper examines how multiplatforming industrial strategies abandon fixity in order to capture their audiences in intensive networks of content and consumption, and asks what economic exigencies are served once a viewer has become invested in a series. Through a close analysis of USA Networks television-Web convergence, he will show that a new transmedia experience of narrativity attempts to solidify an active migratory audience that is constantly moving in between a complex array of interconnecting monadic points of consumption.
Full program here.
Para|Sites: Locations and Dislocations of Media
New York University, February 21-22, 2013
Juan Llamas Rodriguez – “Narcocinema: On Liminal Tastes, Audiences, and Circulation”
This paper will use the case of narcocinema to address issues arising from marginal objects of study, such as “tasteless” genres, informal forms of circulation, and liminal/diffuse audiences, as well as the new avenues of research that these objects might illustrate.
Full program here.
Reel Love: Cinephilia in the Digital Age
Carleton University, March 15-16, 2013
Adam Szymanski – “‘The Cinema of Poetry’ Reconsidered: Depression as an Aesthetic Sensibility in Contemporary Global Art Cinema”
Adam’s presentation will perform a re-reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s seminal essay “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’” in order to analyze the aesthetic techniques employed by the recent wave of global art films dealing with the theme of psychic depression. The talk will link this re-reading to the contemporary crisis of the self under cognitive capitalism.
Full program here.
The Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) National Conference
Washington, DC March 27-31, 2013
Kristopher Woofter – “‘Gothic Realism’ in 1940s Hollywood Horror”
In this paper, Kristopher will provide some probable cause for the dissemination of horror conventions seemingly concretized in the 1930s, into a number of 1940s sub-genres that are no longer seen as horror because they do not flirt heavily enough with the supernatural. These sub-genres include the paranoid woman’s film, the Gothic melodrama, the mystery film, and even some types of film noir. He will argue that there is in these many sub-genres and modes a noticeable commingling of Gothic and realist discourses. In identifying a discourse of Gothic realism in forties horror films, this paper suggest that forties Hollywood cinema became a hybrid site of struggle and contention regarding how best to articulate social, cultural and political anxieties on the homefront for both women and men.
Kristopher is also Co-Chair of the “Horror Area” of the PCA/ACA National Conference.