CALL FOR PROPOSALS/PAPERS
Submission deadline: October 1, 2010

BIOPICS AND AMERICAN NATIONAL IDENTITIES

A special issue of the journal a/b: studies in auto/biography to be
published in 2011

	To be edited by William H. Epstein, "Biopics and American National
Identities" will be a collection of original articles by scholars, critics,
and theorists in auto/biography studies, cinema studies, and American
studies on several intersecting topics: the recent (re)(de)taxonomizing of
film genres dealing with life studies under the pressure of a postmodern
perspective (e.g., docudramas, self-biographies, moc docs); the
(re)(de)formation of traditional biopic generic conventions (as well as
traditional taxonomic categories associated with gender, class, race,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, aesthetic sensibility, disciplinary
authority, etc.) in such more or less formally reflexive films as, for
example, Citizen Kane, Bonnie and Clyde, Reds, American Splendor, De-Lovely,
and I'm Not There; the very American (late-capitalist) way in which the film
industry characteristically bypasses/fictionalizes/pulverizes traditional
cultural modes of biographical recognition by purchasing (the book, the
rights, the acquiescence) or by otherwise appropriating (through, e.g.,
Hollywood studio research departments and their fetishizing of mise-en-scène
period detail) a biographical subject's life-text; and how American
film-making enables (as it resists) the (re)(de)construction of a national
cinema in which (in)famous, (in)significant individuals enter the cultural
discourse of the mass market and assume imitable and/or monitory subject
positions that affirm (as they deny) American national identit(y)(ies). This
is, of course, only a partial list of the post-modern, post-colonial,
post-feminist, post-Marxist, post-Vietnam, post-Cold-War,
post-anything-else-you-can-name possibilities which this special issue and
your contribution can offer. 

	The submission deadline is October 1, 2010, but potential contributors are
encouraged to contact Professor Epstein as soon as possible about their
intentions. You may reach him at: Department of English, University of
Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, or [log in to unmask]
.

William H. Epstein, Professor of English at the University of Arizona, is a
distinguished biographer, biographical critic, and biographical theorist. He
has written John Cleland: A Life (Columbia, 1974) and Recognizing Biography
(Pennsylvania, 1987), edited Contesting the Subject: Essays in the
Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism
(Purdue, 1991), and contributed many articles on these and related subjects
to learned journals. His work has been nominated for the MLA's James Russell
Lowell Prize and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Award, and has won the
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies' Clifford Prize. He has been
awarded grants from ACLS and  NEH, has served as Chair of the Executive
Committee of MLA's  Non-Fictional Prose Division, and is on the editorial
board of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. 
 

----
Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org