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 [log in to unmask] ******************************************************************************* 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 ******************************************************************************* ---- 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]