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