Linda Williams at Bryn Mawr

Linda Williams
Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley

“Megamelodrama: Vertical and Horizontal Suspensions of the 'Classical'”

Monday March 21, 2011

4:30 p.m. (Reception to follow)

Carpenter 21

Bryn Mawr College

Since the late eighties, American audiences have been witnessing a quite literal expansion of the very dimensions of movie and television melodrama. The movie screen has expanded spatially. Where it once grew wider in competition with television, it now grows deeper--as 3D becomes more popular but also through a new dynamization of the vertical. In contrast, the television has expanded "horizontally" in time as serial melodramas go on and on. Both of these expansions suggest that we need to rethink the very nature of the melodramatic space and time of the moving image in contrast to assumed norms of the "classical."

Sponsored by Class of 1902 Lecture Fund, Department of English, Program in Film Studies, Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Center for Social Sciences

Penn Colloquium: Xiaojue Wang

Xiaojue Wang (Univ. of Pennsylvania)
"Building Leisure and Everyday Life in Socialist Shanghai"

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall

University of Pennsylvania

Abstract:
My talk considers socialist urban imaginations and reconstructions of Shanghai as represented in a small group of low-budget films in the late 1950s focusing on the everyday life of early socialist China among the vast bulk of war films and Cold War conspiracy films. It examines how ideological hegemony of the fledgling socialist state is projected onto the reconfiguration of urban space and urban landscape, and how the construction of socialist new person, and the conceptualization of work and leisure, and the production of new socialist spaces are tightly intricated in the cinema of the Seventeen Years Period.

March 2011: Fabienne Darling-Wolf

This Friday is the next talk in the PCMS series.

"When Candy met Asterix: Japanese animation’s voyage to France and the shaping of global culture"

Fabienne Darling-Wolf (Temple University)

Respondent: William Gardner (Swarthmore College)

Temple University Center City campus (TUCC)
Room 420
(bring ID to show front desk)
Friday, March 18, 5:30 pm





Abstract:
Based on a translocal comparative analysis informed by qualitative interviews with Japanese and French media consumers, this paper considers what the long history of Japanese animation and manga’s presence in France can tell us about the nature of contemporary globalized cultural forms and their local negotiation, particularly when considering the wide variety of cultural environments these texts—often originally based on European or American literary works—propose to represent (including France’s “native” culture). Pointing to significant differences in the nature of the genres’ influence in the French and American contexts, it concludes with a discussion of the dangers of assuming that the United States can be taken as representative of an essentialized “West,” often opposed, in turn, to an equally essentialized and exoticized “non-Western Other.”

Bios:

Dr. Fabienne Darling-Wolf is Associate Professor of Journalism in the School of the Journalism and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia. She also teaches and supervises graduate students in the school’s Mass Media and Communication Doctoral Program.

Dr. Darling-Wolf’s research focuses on processes of mediated cultural influence and negotiation in a global context, paying particular attention to how such processes intersect with gendered, racial and ethnic identity formation. Her work has been published in Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journalism and Communication Monographs, New Media and Society, Popular Music and Society, Feminist Media Studies, Popular Communication, Journalism, Journalism Studies, Communication Review, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Visual Communication Quarterly and Journal of Communication Inquiry.

William Gardner is an associate professor of Japanese at Swarthmore College. He is author of Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006) and “Literature as Life-form: Media and Modernism in the Literary Theory of Okuma Nobuyuki,” Monumenta Nipponica (2008). His current research is on science fiction and on media and virtuality in contemporary fiction.