Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television
Symposium: Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television
Organisers: Text, Genre and Visual Studies Group, Media, Communication and Performing Arts, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.
Date: 29 October 2010.
Venue: Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.
Times: 9.30 – 5.30.
Melodrama is one of film and television’s primary historical, aesthetic and ideological modes, and it continues to be applied usefully and variously to film and TV texts. In cultural criticism broadly, however, there is still a tendency to think of melodrama as a domestic and at best diminished form. This symposium will consider the continued relevance of melodrama to contemporary and international texts, as well as the contested and changing meanings of the mode in film and television studies. The symposium is particularly interested in, but is not restricted to, the following themes:
- Genre, narrative and mise en scène
- Realism and neo-realisms
- Gender, sexuality and queer identities
- Adaptation, translation and the transcultural
- Region, nation and the post-national
- Memory, nostalgia and reclaimed histories
- Interdisciplinarity
- Cross-media forms
The symposium is free to attend and includes lunch, but places will be limited. Confirmed speakers include Gary Needham, author of Brokeback Mountain, EUP, 2010, and Glen Creeber, author of Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, BFI, 2004.
If you are interested in participating in the symposium, please send an abstract (approximately 200 words) of a proposed paper and brief biographical details to mstewart@qmu.ac.uk no later than 24th September 2010.
