MSA 11
Montreal, 5-8 November 2009

Conceived as enabling a new universal, international, or voiceless language, the medium of cinema envisioned a visual grammar that alternatively threatened and inspired the project of literary modernism in its interrogation and innovation of language. How did formal structures of film grammar, such as cross-cutting, continuity editing, montage, and point-of-view, affect modernist literary construction? How did filmmakers' and film theorists' conceptions of a medium-specific language, modeled on hieroglyphics, for example, or on what Jean Epstein called photogénie, influence or parallel experiments in literature? Were the developments of film grammar significant enough to transform literary semiotics, or to put new emphases on iconicity, indexicality, or the symbolic in literary texts?

Please send a 300-word abstract with your name and institutional affiliation to Laurel Harris, CUNY Graduate Center, at laurel_e_harris at yahoo.com by May 9, 2009. This panel is proposed and needs to be reviewed for acceptance.