Please join us for the next seminar of Inventions of the Text 2012/13
Literature & the Intermedial Gaze: Cinematic Configurations of Literary Process
Professor Judith Buchanan
University of York
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Wednesday 22nd May 2013
5:30 – 7:00 pm
Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room
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Speaker: Dr. Judith Buchanan, University of York
Recent years have seen a proliferation of films about writers, real and
fictional, and an enhanced interest in acts of writing as a filmed
subject. In the first half of my talk, I ask how filmmakers have
narratively and iconographically configured writers’ lives and acts of
writing, and how they have reflected upon the material, imaginative and
commercial operations of literary processes. In the second half, I will
take one example of a fairly recent film in which (in this case,
fictional) acts of writing are narratively and iconographically central.
Von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen/ The Lives of Others (2006)
is anchored in two politically and aesthetically opposed acts of writing
emerging from two comparably opposed authors. As the film identifies
and then tracks the incremental erosion of this opposition, the
suspicions that attach to author figures in the literarily censorious
GDR before 1989 come under scrutiny. The self-preserving imperative to
anonymise a dissenting piece of work is here shown to be matched by the
comparably insistent institutional imperative to deanonymise such a
work. And the series of counterposed quests to discover the author of a
work – the Stasi operative’s desire to know the playwright, the state’s
desire to know the dissident writer, the playwright’s desire to know the
writer of his surveillance report – illustrate, in hyperbolised form, a
psycho-social ‘desire’ for the author that arguably informs every act
of reading.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Judith Buchanan is Professor of Film and Literature in the Department
of English and Related Literature and Director of the Humanities
Research Centre at the University of York. Publications include the
monographs Shakespeare on Film (Longman-Pearson, 2005) and Shakespeare
on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge University Press,
2009), the edited collection The Writer on Film: Screening Literary
Authorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and numerous articles on
literature and silent cinema, and early cinema's relations to the other
arts. Current projects include work on The Tempest in performance, on
murderous women in film and literature and on cinema and the machine.
She speaks regularly in arts cinemas as well as to academics.
For more information, find us on facebook, follow us on Twitter (@inventionsSem) or check our blog: inventionsofthetext.blogspot.com
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