Call for papers

Image and Idea: The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick

2000 Northeast Modern Language Association
Buffalo, NY                                     April 7-8


Roland Barthes: "Now even--and above all if--the image is in a certain
manner the limit of meaning, it permits the consideration of a veritable
ontology of the process of signification. How does meaning get into the
image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?"

No one who grew up watching Stanley Kubrick films can easily conceive of
the image as a limit of meaning. That's because Kubrick was a great master
at getting meaning into the image. His mature films always challenge their
viewers to read them like texts, offering networks of allusion and analogy
that treat images like language. The image of the obelisk in _2001_, for
example,  "looks" like a hole in the image that can be filled with
reading. There are other instances in Kubrick's cinema: the killings that
punctuate the two sections of _Full Metal Jacket_, the recurrence of Peter
Sellers in _Strangelove_, even (embryonically) the mannequin-factory fight
scene in _Killer's Kiss_.

This panel will consider Kubrick's methods of making cinematic meaning.
Did he, as many critics claim, produce cold and cerebral films that chose
pretentious quasi-philosophy over character and narrative, or do his films
offer genuinely challenging cinematic conceptualizations of real issues?
Can we detect a trajectory in the relationship between idea and image
throughout his career? How do race, gender, and sexuality figure in his
methods of signification?  How do particular films put meaning into
images? To what extent do Kubrick's images resist or undermine their
meanings?

Send 1-2 page abstracts by September 15, 1999 to:

Sean Desilets
Department of English
East Hall
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02130

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Sean Desilets                   *               "The only people who
                        *               *       believe that there is
Department of English           *               a language that is
East Hall               *               *       not theoretical are
Tufts University                *               professors of
Medford, MA 02155       *               *       literature."
[log in to unmask]              *                       Paul de Man

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