Monday, August 14, 2017

New Book--Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties

A new book from members of the area:

Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties
Editors: Yang, Sharon Rose, Healey, Kathleen (Eds.)
http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319331645

Hardcover $99.99
price for USA
ISBN 978-3-319-33164-5

eBook $79.99
price for USA (gross)
ISBN 978-3-319-33165-2
Digitally watermarked, DRM-free
Included format: PDF, EPUB
ebooks can be used on all reading devices


About this book:

  • Looks at the role of landscapes in Gothic Fiction - an under-examined area
  • Broad historical sweep, from 18th century to 20th century
  • Examines other media including film

This book is about the ways that Gothic literature has been transformed since the 18th century across cultures and across genres. In a series of essays written by scholars in the field, the book focuses on landscape in the Gothic and the ways landscape both reflects and reveals the dark elements of culture and humanity. It goes beyond traditional approaches to the Gothic by pushing the limits of the definition of the genre. From landscape painting to movies and video games, from memoir to fiction, and from works of different cultural origins and perspectives, this volume traverses the geography of the Gothic revealing the anxieties that still haunt humanity into the twenty-first century.



Table of contents (13 chapters)

Introduction: Haunted Landscapes and Fearful Spaces—Expanding Views on the Geography of the Gothic
Yang, Sharon Rose (et al.) / Pages 1-18

Dark Shadows in the Promised Land: Landscapes of Terror and the Visual Arts in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly
Healey, Kathleen / Pages 21-46

Haunting Landscapes in “Female Gothic” Thriller Films: From Alfred Hitchcock to Orson Welles
Biesen, Sheri Chinen / Pages 47-69

“Beauty Sleeping in the Lap of Horror”: Landscape Aesthetics and Gothic Pleasures, from The Castle of Otranto to Video Games
Davenport, Alice / Pages 71-103

What the Green Grass Hides: Denial and Deception in Suburban Detroit
Vayo, Amber B. / Pages 107-124

“Go Steady, Undine!”: The Horror of Ambition in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country
Drizou, Myrto / Pages 125-145

The Convent as Coven: Gothic Implications of Women-Centered Illness and Healing Narratives in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Waller-Peterson, Belinda M. / Pages 147-168

Haunting Memories: Gothic and Memoir
Moore, Erica / Pages 169-198

The Indian Gothic
Pai, Nalini / Pages 201-223

St. Bernard’s: Terrors of the Light in the Gothic Hospital
Rieger, Christy / Pages 225-238

Nature Selects the Horla: How the Concept of Natural Selection Influences Guy de Maupassant’s Horror Tale
Yang, Sharon Rose / Pages 239-269

Ruins of Empire: Refashioning the Gothic in J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984)
Watson, Alex / Pages 271-291

Gothic Landscapes in Mary Butts’s Ashe of Rings
Foy, Roslyn Reso / Pages 293-305



About the editors:

Sharon Rose Yang is Professor of English at Worcester State University, USA. She both teaches and writes on the Gothic and nineteenth-century literature. She has published in nineteenth-century literature and is the author of Goddesses, Mages, and Wise Women: The Female Pastoral Guide in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century English Drama.

Kathleen Healey is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Worcester State University, USA. Her research includes literature and the visual arts, Gothic Literature, and American Literature.

CFP Not Just Kidding Around: On Teaching Children’s Media (8/18/2017; SCMS 2018)

Of potential interest, but do note the impending deadline:

Not Just Kidding Around: On Teaching Children’s Media (SCMS 2018)
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/08/04/not-just-kidding-around-on-teaching-children%E2%80%99s-media-scms-2018

deadline for submissions: August 18, 2017

full name / name of organization: Andrew Scahill / University of Colorado Denver

contact email: adscahill@gmail.com


**CFP for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) 2018 Conference in Toronto**

In an academic setting, weighty or dramatic “adult” films are generally met with intellectual curiosity by students, or at least an acknowledgement that they are “worthy” of consideration. Genre films like horror or action are met with more resistance, but generally students are willing to admit they have some sort of ideological investments. Films aimed at children, however, are often dismissed as just entertainment. Surely we may analyze Bicycle Thieves, but Home Alone? Yes to Goodfellas, no to Goonies.

The assumption is often that younger audience equates to a simpler text. In teaching children’s media, professors also must deal with the legacy of media effects research, which often leads to knee-jerk and oversimplified assumptions (“Disney princesses are bad!”) and the construction of a completely passive child spectator. Rarely, too, do we discuss how children’s media is designed with a bilateral address to both children and adults, often serving as a meditation on what it means to be a parent as much as what it means to be a child. As a “low” or unworthy genre, professors may also have to deal with an administration unable to see the value in teaching a course on kids’ films.

Pedagogy is a neglected subject in media studies, and this workshop promises a positive, collaborative, and supportive atmosphere. This will be a “best practices”-style workshop, and our facilitators will bring teaching materials to distribute among attendees, including model syllabi, assignment prompts, and discussion prompts. Each facilitator will be asked to prepare a short testimony about a challenge they experienced teaching children’s media, and what steps they took to overcome it. This comes at an important time for our 2018 conference, as the “Children’s and Youth Media and Culture” scholarly interest group is merely a year old, and this workshop would aid in our community-building and recruitment efforts.

To express interest, please contact Andrew Scahill (University of Colorado Denver) at adscahill@gmail.com by August 18 and explain how you would be able to contribute to this workshop.


keywords: pedagogy workshop children media animation film cinema kids academia

Last updated August 7, 2017 

Sunday, August 6, 2017

CFP Women in Genres of the Fantastic and Transmedia Entertainment (9/1/2017)

Women in Genres of the Fantastic and Transmedia Entertainment
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/07/29/women-in-genres-of-the-fantastic-and-transmedia-entertainment

deadline for submissions:
September 1, 2017


full name / name of organization:
Amanda Howell/Griffith University


contact email:
a.howell@griffith.edu.au




Call for Papers: Women in Genres of the Fantastic and Transmedia Entertainment

The particular concern of this edited collection is to discover how transmedia world-building in genres of the fantastic might open spaces of possibility, especially for women—a group historically under-represented as media producers, also often overlooked or devalued as audience-members and consumers. To this end, we seek proposals for book chapters utilising a range of methodological approaches to investigate female characters in transmedia universes belonging to genres of the fantastic, also to address the various creative contributions of women who produce and consume fantastic fictions in a converged/cross-platform/transmedia environment.

Please submit your 250 word abstract for consideration by 1 September 2017 to Amanda Howell a.howell@griffith.edu.au, along with a brief bio. The editors will contact you concerning the status of your proposal no later than 31 October 2017. Completed chapters of no more than 6,000 words should consist substantially of new material and original research; draft chapters will be submitted to an editorial and peer review process in 2018, the timetable for which to be advised. This collection is not yet under contract. Its development is funded, in part, by a collaboration grant from Griffith University (Queensland, Australia) and Southern Denmark University (Odense). Editors: Stephanie Green (GU), Amanda Howell (GU), and Rikke Schubart (SDU).

Background

Women figure in somewhat ambiguous and problematic ways in today’s entertainment media environment, being at once highly visible yet often also numerically under-represented both on screen and in production sectors, especially in the context of big budget Hollywood film and globally-dominant US television. Nevertheless, since the turn of this millennium, genres of the fantastic – including horror, fantasy, the fairy tale, sci-fi, and the superhero franchise –are noteworthy for their focus on and redevelopment of female heroes. Characters like Jessica Jones, Ms Marvel (Kamala Khan), Wonder Woman and Super Girl from universes of Marvel and DC comics are particularly interesting examples of the shifting shape of female heroism, their story-worlds spreading across film, television, comics and games. Premium cable/post-broadcast/non-network television series such as The Walking Dead (AMC 2010–), Game of Thrones (HBO 2011–), The 100, (CW 2014–), Penny Dreadful (Showtime 2014-16), and Stranger Things (Netflix 2016–) also use their fantastic and speculative premises to innovate new forms of female heroism as part of their appeal to multiple niche audiences. While, in children’s media, efforts to engage a previously underrepresented girl audience include offerings such as Mattel's television/online media franchise/ doll line Monster High (2010-present) which remakes and regenders classic Universal and other traditional monsters for 7-12 year olds. High budget Hollywood film remains dominated by male directors, but Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins 2017) has become the highest grossing film directed by a woman. Female showrunners, directors, and scriptwriters are increasingly visible and important to recent developments in television, while a number of high-profile films and television series are based on books written by women. Female audiences have responded in turn by creating vibrant communities around fantastic entertainments, numerous fan and paratextual productions further expanding imaginary worlds, while breaking down boundaries between producers and consumers.

Aims

The editors of this collection are interested in investigating how a converged and rapidly-changing media environment might offer new sites and means and opportunities for women to tell stories. And what opportunities might be offered especially by genres of the fantastic, which have in common ‘as-if’ imagining, a cognitive meta-thinking unique to humans, said to generate ‘self-awareness and self-reflexivity’ (Bould 2002: 81), leading to ‘transformation and reflection’ (Feldt 2012: 1). A central aim of this collection is to explore the hypothesis that the fantastic, because it lends itself to imaginative acts and creativity, may as a consequence open spaces of possibility for female producers and audiences. Similarly, we wish to explore what possibilities might become available within the transmedia environment where, at the same time that multi-national media conglomerates may dominate, multiple points of entry are possible into the imagined universes of the fantastic, with as a consequence multiple opportunities to create and consume its fictions.

Specific topics of interest for this collection include but are not limited to
  • women’s representations and roles within a contemporary fantastic transmedia environment (film, television, computer and board games, comics and novelisations, internet-based and other fan activities), with a special focus on how these might challenge gender stereotypes and/or re-author familiar gender scripts, including the renegotiation of gender in relation to race, class, sexual preference;
  • the opportunities or particular challenges transmedia fictions in genres of the fantastic might offer female producers (directors, producers, designers, writers) of media content;
  • the significance of fantasy genres in transmedia entertainment—and a converged media environment more generally—especially for the sometimes ignored and historically de-valued female audience;
  • the power dynamics of transmedia entertainment, as exemplified by the fantasy genre, including conflict and congruency between old and new media, big and small scale productions, global and local productions;
  • the way transmedia fictions might work with, play with, adapt, recruit, or transform fantasy texts and tropes of the past to remake narrative possibilities in the present;
  • those different modes of authorship and audience engagement produced by transmedia entertainment, those new or altered relationships between authors and producers, readers and audiences for narrative entertainments, especially in genres of the fantastic.

Last updated August 4, 2017

CFP Blade Runner International Session (9/21/2017; ACLA 2018)

CFP: ACLA 2018 Seminar, "Blade Runner International"
Announcement published by Antonio Cordoba on Friday, July 21, 2017
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/187751/cfp-acla-2018-seminar-blade-runner-international

Type: Call for Papers
Location: United States


CFP: Seminar "Blade Runner International." Annual convention of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Los Angeles, March 29-April 1, 2018.

https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting

Thirty-five years ago, Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982) brought Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) to the big screen and in the process introduced a groundbreaking visual language for science fiction film in its creation of a dystopian future Los Angeles. As ACLA prepares to convene in Los Angeles, just one year shy of the setting of Scott’s film, this seminar is interested in exploring Blade Runner’s influence on cultural production around the globe.
  • To what extent has the film’s “retro-fitted” aesthetic shaped the visual language of the international iterations of science fiction sub-genres such as cyberpunk and steampunk? 
  • How has its representation of human and robot relations intervened in subsequent explorations of – and scholarship about – the post-human? 
  • What connections might we draw between Blade Runner’s portrayal of the future and more recent representations of dystopian futures and/or urban spaces? 
  • How have re-workings of some of Blade Runner’s tropes in literature and film from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and non-Anglophone Europe in turn reshaped our current understanding of the original film? 
We welcome papers from diverse historical, ethno-national, and social contexts that examine and/or engage with a range of media (film, literature, animé, video-games, etc.).

We invite you to contact us or to submit an abstract to the ACLA website by September 21.
Contact Info:


Emily Maguire (Northwestern University), e-maguire@northwestern.edu, and Antonio Cordoba (Manhattan College), antoniocordoba@gmail.com.
Contact Email:
antoniocordoba@gmail.com
URL:
https://www.acla.org/blade-runner-international