Call for Papers Deconstruction and Cinema 2002 Northeast Modern Language Association Convention Toronto. April 12 & 13, 2002 Because its chief rival, psychoanalysis, has dominated theoretical discourse on film for the last thirty years, deconstruction has had relatively little to say about cinema. In part, we can justify this silence by recognizing that deconstruction is explicitly concerned with literature. On the other hand, though, deconstruction has tended to expand the purview of what counts as a literary text. Even the most vigorous and convincing of deconstructionist advocates of literary specificity, Paul de Man, has written that "[w]e now have to recognize the necessity of a non-perceptual, linguistic moment in painting and music, and learn to read pictures rather than to imagine meaning." This panel, then, will bring cinema and deconstruction into dialog, considering not only how deconstruction can address cinema, but also how cinema reflects back on deconstruction. We might imagine, for example, that an art form rooted so strongly in the phenomonal status of the photographic object might present rather a challenge to a discourse that rejects any epistemology rooted in a pre-linguistic model of perception. Coming at the same question the other way, however, deconstruction might teach us to pay better attention to cinema's "rhetoric," the ways in which its technology gives shape to what we only mistake for a pregiven reality. Deconstruction might also help us to perceive cinema's deployment of the same techniques to construct itself as an aesthetic object, despite cinema's very deep implication in a historical conjunction that has arguably brought aesthetics to its final crisis. I am not at all interested in presenting deconstruction as an "alternative" to psychoanalysis in film studies, and will not welcome papers that valorize deconstruction in the interest of bashing psychoanalysis. I will welcome papers that either lay out the theoretical groundwork for a dialog between cinema and deconstruction or begin that dialog in readings of particular films and/or deconstructive texts. Please submit 1-2 page abstracts by September 15 to: Sean Desilets Department of English Tufts University Medford, MA 02155 [log in to unmask] ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu