Proposed Panel for SCMS Annual Conference
Imagining, Imaging, and Remembering the Method in the 21st Century
March 21-25, 2012, Boston, MA

It is the most significant development in US film performance in the 
20th century and has accordingly been the subject of constant critical 
and popular scrutiny.  Still, Method acting remains a vexing and 
elusive subject for scholars and general audiences alike.  As we enter 
the second decade of the 21st century, and confront both deceased 
Method actors and their purported descendants, it becomes necessary to 
take stock of what the so-called “Method” does within a new century 
rife with shifting contexts, morphing mediascapes, and competing 
historical narratives.

This panel seeks papers that deploy varying critical perspectives, 
methodological approaches, and/or historical artifacts towards this 
end, work that adds clarity to the myriad ways in which past and 
present performances (and performers) are imagined, imaged, and 
remembered within and without 21st century film cultures.  Possible 
topics include, but are not limited to: memorialization and 
historicization of the Method and its practitioners; discourses of 
discipline, transformation, and the Method acting body; transnational 
circulation of the Method actor; televisual and new media 
representations of the Method; neoliberalism, citizenship, and the 
identity politics of the Method and its practitioners; industrial and 
institutional discourses surrounding the Method; and the Method’s 
relationship to mutations in celebrity cultures and star systems.

Please submit a 300 word abstract, a 5 item bibliography, and a brief 
bio to [log in to unmask] by August 10, 2011.





Justin Owen Rawlins
PhD Candidate
Communication and Culture
American Studies
Indiana University
[log in to unmask]

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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu