31st Annual Film and Literature Conference at Florida State University Documenting Trauma, Documenting Terror February 3-5, 2006 Call for Papers As terms denoting psychological states, "trauma" and "terror" each mark limits of expression. Representations of the traumatic past may just as easily repeat or act out an injury as resolve or work through it. Terror's present is famously blind, unthinking, sublime. Each of these terms thus suggests a failure of representation. Yet both trauma and terror have become central to the political discussions that chart our future, discussions that often aim to solidify and make actionable the difference between perpetrators and victims, terrorists and the terrorized, inhuman atrocity and justifiable retribution. What does it mean to document trauma or terror under such historical conditions? How might attempts to work through traumas be distinguished from the act of compulsively repeating them? Can the two ever be fully distinguished? These questions have long been central to considerations of how filmmakers, writers, and artists document the Holocaust. They have been important to investigations of U.S. racism, from the Middle Passage and Indian Removal, through lynching campaigns and the internment of Japanese Americans, to more recent hate crimes. Questions about what it means to document trauma are also increasingly germane to representations of September 11, 2001. The 2006 FSU Film and Literature conference will extend these inquiries and look beyond them to considerations of many traumas and terrors. We hope the conference will also discuss the comparative field generated by "trauma" and "terror" as rubrics. Is it appropriate to see all traumas as comparable, as posing similar ethical challenges of documentation? Or do holocausts, lynchings, genocides, and hate crimes demand different explanatory frames? Are particular procedures necessary to represent an event as a trauma or an act of terror? If so, what are they? Do they differ in visual and verbal media? Do forms characterized as fiction employ different procedures from those characterized as nonfiction? In what ways and to what ends have filmmakers, playwrights, novelists, poets, journalists, and other documenters distinguished the perpetrators from victims and bystanders? How and with what consequences have they challenged or undermined those distinctions? Finally, the conference will consider the role the act of documenting plays in making traumatic histories possible. In what ways have assertions of the "way things are"--whether they represent traumas or not--contributed to unfolding horrors? We imagine a wide range of discussion from considerations of the figure of "the terrorist" in recent U.S. films and newspapers, to inquiries into the German and American propaganda films of World War II. Keynote Speakers Dominick LaCapra is Professor of History and Bowmar Professor of Human Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. LaCapra is the recipient of various awards, including the 2001 Dactyl Foundation Award for Aesthetic Theory. His books include: History, Politics, and the Novel (1987); Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma(1994); History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998); Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), and most recently, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (2004). Brian Winston, is a Pro-Vice Chancellor (Vice-President) at the University of Lincoln. As an active journalist, documentary filmmaker, and writer, he worked as a producer/director at Granada Television and BBC-TV in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1985, he won a U.S. prime-time Emmy for documentary scriptwriting (at WNET, New York). His books include: Media Technology and Society (1998); Lies, Damn Lies, and Documentaries (2000); and Messages: Free Expression, Media, and the West from Gutenburg to Google (forthcoming, October 2005). Janet Walker is Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she is also affiliated with the Women's Studies Program. She is the recipient of various awards, including a 2001 Distinguished Teaching Award from UCSB and a recent grant from the California Council for the Humanities to make a series of experimental video portraits of local Holocaust survivors and refugees. Her edited and authored books include: Feminism and Documentary, editor with Diane Waldman (1999); Westerns: Films through History (2001); and most recently, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (2005). Keith A. Beauchamp is a filmmaker who has dedicated 10 years of his life to telling the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy brutally slain in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. His self-financed documentary is entitled The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. Beauchamp studied Criminal Justice and Civil Rights at Southern University (Baton Rouge, LA) and then moved to New York to become a filmmaker. He has worked in music video production with Big Baby Films and is founder of Till Freedom Comes Productions (TFCP), which is devoted producing, developing and distributing high quality entertainment that is both socially significant and educational. The deadline for conference panel proposals and abstracts is October 1, 2005. For further updates, please visit our website at http://english3.fsu.edu/~filmlit2006. Conference Organizers: Caroline "Kay" Picart (English), Mark Garrett Cooper (English), and Frank P. Tomasulo (Film School) _______________________________________________ Filmlitconference mailing list [log in to unmask] https://lists.fsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/filmlitconference ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]