CALL FOR PAPERS *** CALL FOR PAPERS *** CALL FOR PAPERS *** CALL FOR PAPERS
 
 
Papers are solicited for a collection of essays dealing with Alfred
Hitchcock's VERTIGO (1958).
 
PLEASE NOTE:
    THE ESSAYS NEED NOT BE WRITTEN BY  "EXPERTS" IN CINEMA STUDIES, and in
fact one of the premises of the collection will be that the essays will
represent the approaches of a number of different disciplines and reading
practices to a single cinematic text.
 
The contributions, thus, do not have to coform to any particular way of
thinking about films, about texts, about culture, or even about the
enterprise of reading.  Certainly historians, ethnographers, theologians,
narratologists, structuralists and post- structuralists, and so on, all can
provide insights and persepctives lacking to those in other fields.
What DOES matter is that contributions be careful, thoughtful, and informed
by some more or less clear notion of what is involved and what is at stake in
"reading" a text, cinematic or otherwise.
 
There are no requirements as to length--go on as long as you need to say
what you have to say--or format, except for one: each contribution MUST
be accompanied by an introduction which addresses or considers the following
questions:  1.  What "approach" or "critical method" does the essay use?
2.  Who is the ostensible audeince for the essay?  3.  Why is the
discourse of the essay of any interest [this is intended not as a commentary
on the value of the essay but on the value of discourse it uses or the
project it sets for itself]?  4.  Does the essay attempt to "discover"
things that are already there -- latent -- within the text, or does it
have some other agenda?  5. Is the purpose of the essay to "explain" or
"unpack" the text, [i.e., is it fundamentally a piece of hermeneutics] or
does it use the cinematic text as an instance of some larger critical or
political or methodological issues that it can be used to illuminate in
some way?  6. Is the text--the film VERTIGO--conceived in the critical
essay as a work of art, as a trace of human intentionality, as a document
in cultural studies, as a narrative, as a diegesis, as a series of images;
that is, among the infinite number of features available for scrutiny
in this [or any other] "text," which specifically are the features that
the essay is examining?
 
Essays rich in these introductory materials are particularly welcome.
 
 
Send inquiries or proposals via e-mail to:
 
        [log in to unmask]
 
 
PLEASE do not send full essays at this time, only inquiries or
proposals.
 
----
To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L
in the message.  Problems?  Contact [log in to unmask]