Appended below is a CFP for a panel considering the function and value of
cinema studies as an academic discipline for the meeting of the American
Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) to be held April 4-6, 2003 at Cal State San Marcos. The document should speak for
itself, but a word about the ACLA meeting is called for since it is
dramatically different from most others.
At most conferences panels convene once, panelists read papers, there is
(one hopes) a useful exchange of ideas, and the project ends. At the ACLA
meeting each panel ? properly called a seminar ? meets for some two and a
half hours each day for three days, during which half a dozen to a dozen
related papers are read, discussed, questioned, and revisited. At most
conferences most of the people attending any panel are simply audience
members. At the ACLA meeting many if not most of the group attending each
seminar will be those who have prepared papers for delivery and therefore
have thought systematically about the issues being discussed. While
guests?usually those participating actively in other seminars ? are common
and welcome, the character of each seminar is shaped by those presenting
papers in it. As a result the ACLA meeting offers learning opportunities
perhaps unmatched at any other conference.
For more info on the conference visit the conference website: www.csusm.edu/acla2003
For more info on the ACLA visit the organization website: http://www.acla.org/index2_frames.html
For more info on this seminar please contact me via return e-mail.
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WHAT TO SAY ABOUT A FILM:
PROSPECTS FOR HUMANISTIC DISCOURSE IS A POST-DISCIPLINARY
AGE
Historically, departments of literature existed as instruments for
transmitting a civilization's most honored texts, and the keys for reading
them, from one generation to the next ? and, along with these texts, the
civilization's culture and values. In a "post-everything" age, the
premises that anchored this enterprise are called into radical question;
university humanities departments, can no longer justify their role by
appeals to conventional values. Indeed, given contemporary
preoccupations, a field such as comparative literature, for all its
capaciousness, seems especially vulnerable to attack because of its
(ostensive) focus on texts rather than on persons, politics, or programs.
Since departments of literature have regularly employed ?even defined --
the discourses of literary criticism, an attempt to reconsider the role of
literary study in the contemporary world has to consider as well the
perennially problematic question of the function of criticism. This
seminar proposes to return again to this question, inflected in this
instance as "the function of academic criticism at the present post-modern
time." Because notions of what counts as a text worth critical analysis
have changed dramatically, the seminar proposes to re-examine the role of
criticism by focusing ? significantly but not exclusively ? on a kind of
criticism that until recently was virtually unknown in literature
departments, film criticism, and papers that consider approaches to cinema
studies are especially welcome. Nevertheless we invite papers that deal
with any aspect of the question of how the enterprise of "literary study"
should be pursued and can be justified absent the cultural assurances of a
more innocent past.
Some possible topics, in addition to inquiries into specific films or the
work of specific authors/auteurs, might include:
- Textual study and elite culture
- The value of aesthetic education in the post modern world
- The public function of the academic intellectual
- "Greatness" as a factor in the study of texts
- Walter Benjamin revisited: what the academic study of film implies for
the humanities
- I.A. Richards revisited: "aesthetics" and politics in post-modernity
- McLuhan revisited: the political implications of specific media
- Arnold revisited: texts and touchstones
- Teachers teaching students about student culture
- Pleasure as a valid educational goal
- Film study and canon formation
- Teaching texts vs, using texts to teach other things
- Teaching literature when authorship is dead [or in the hands of a
multinational corporation]
- Art and democracy
Proposals, abstracts or inquiries ? preferably by e-mail -- to Mike
Frank; e-mail address: [log in to unmask] [Regular mail address: Mike
Frank/Dep't. of English/Bentley College/Waltham, MA 02452.] Deadline for
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For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives:
http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html
receipt of paper proposals: 23 September.