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