CALL FOR PAPERS for the Northeast Modern Language Association convention
in Buffalo, NY April 7-8, 2000.
Session Title: "Gothic Castles, Colonial Gazes: American Cinema and
the British Literary Tradition"
Since Gilbert and Guber's 1979 Madwoman in the Attic, the gothic
castle has become a premier site to renegotiate the socio-political
positions of those historically left outside the legitimate exchanges,
contracts, and legacies of the (ostensibly) homosocial body politic.
Insofar, these negotiations have largely focused on the position of
women, especially the potential disturbance that women's sexuality
poses to the patriarchal distribution of wealth and power.
But the "female gothic," however itself "exotic" and "foreign," also
has its own doubles. From the _Mysteries of Udolpho_ and _Jane
Eyre_ to _The Big Sleep_, _Chinatown_, and _Poltergeist_, this
haunted, gothic mansion of wealthy elites has had important yet
nevertheless extremely repressed connections to the homes,
"haunts," and lands of non-Western "others" whether they be
Native-American, Caribbean, African, Asian, Latino, or even Jewish.
In what ways have twentieth-century American cinema and literature
inherited the colonial legacy of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth
century British novel? How do gothic castles like those in _Bladerunner_
or _The Shining_ mark this inheritance? In what ways are feminine
sexuality, homoeroticism, and ethnicity employed to reconstruct
(and obscure) the demands of the traditional, bourgeois nuclear family,
the gothic, "dysfunctional" family, and the other Other of the racially
marked family?
Please send, fax, or e-mail paper proposals (by 9/15/99) to:
Abigail Lynn Coykendall
306 Clemens Hall, English Department
State University of New York at Buffalo
Amherst, NY 14260
E-mail: alc8@acsu.buffalo.edu
Fax: (716) 645-5980
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