Call for Papers

TIME TRAVEL Area

2008 Film & History Conference

"Film & Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond"

October 30-November 2, 2008

Chicago, Illinois

www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory

Third-Round Deadline: August 1, 2008 

AREA: TIME TRAVEL

H.G.Wells novel The Time Machine (1895) was published in an era when cinema and the cinematic apparatus were just developing. Indeed, as Mèliés was to discover around this time, by judicious use of editing, the cinematic apparatus itself might emulate a time machine in its manipulation of time and narrative sequence. This notion was explored in the Truffaut's time-travel narrative, La Jetee, which skillfully constructs a story using still-frame images with voice-over. Cinema history is replete with such narratives. But the future and the past usually exist in order to understand the problems of the present, be it the threat of nuclear war, as in The Time Machine (1960), or the dysfunctions of nuclear families, as in Back to the Future (1984). 

Paper topics are invited on but not limited to the following:

time-travel narratives within the context of their socio-historic production

narrative devices such as the causal time loop

use of specific theoretical models of narrative interrogation (such as psychoanalytic, carvivalesque, discursive, Deleuzian, postmodern and semiotic perspectives)

philosophical considerations (such as free will and determinism, religious and ritualistic perspectives)

notions of the traveler as tourist

depictions of H. G. Wells as time traveler

media apparatus as time machine (for instance, the television in Pleasantville, the virtual world in Strange Days and The Thirteenth Floor)

the rules and regulations of time travel and parallel worlds

Papers may also include examples from television and graphic novels, where appropriate.

Please send your 300-word proposal by AUGUST 1, 2008, to the area chair:

Joan Ormrod, Chair, Time Travel Area

Manchester Metropolitan University

Department of History of Art and Design

Righton Building

Cavendish St

Manchester UK

M15 6BG

Email: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>  

Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal. Deadline for third-round proposals: August 1, 2008 

This area, comprising multiple panels, is a part of the 2008 biennial Film & History Conference, sponsored by The Center for the Study of Film and History. Speakers will include founder John O'Connor and editor Peter C. Rollins (in a ceremony to celebrate the transfer to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh); Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of Visions of the Apocalypse, Disaster and Memory, and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood; Sidney Perkowitz, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University and author of Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, & the End of the World; and special-effects legend Stan Winston, our Keynote Speaker. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory).

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