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Call for Papers

39th Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 10-13, 2008
Buffalo, New York

David Lynch’s Hollywood

Proposals are invited for a special panel on the cinema of director David
Lynch, with a particular emphasis on the loosely termed “sunshine noir”
(L.A.-based) trilogy of films: Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND
EMPIRE. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
        

*The importance of “psychogenic fugue” (a dissociative disorder
characterized by amnesia and identity loss) as a narrative trope in the
trilogy.

*Reading Lynch’s experimentalism within the framework of various genre
conventions: horror, thriller, melodrama, as well as the noir genre
continuum (sunshine noir, neo-noir, meta-noir, etc.)

*To what extent Lynch’s films belong to the tradition of Hollywood’s
characteristically acid take on itself (The Day of the Locust, Sunset
Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Player, etc.), as well as their
supplemental place as “secret histories” among popular and scholarly
works on American film (Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, David
Thomson’s Beneath Mulholland and The Whole Equation, Daniel Fuchs’ The
Golden West, et al.)

*Various critical speculations that Lynch’s increasing reflexivity
suggests less an attack on Hollywood, than on film form itself, e.g., J.
Hoberman’s remark in his review of INLAND EMPIRE that “film itself” comes
across as evil. (Intriguingly, INLAND EMPIRE is also Lynch’s first
production shot on digital video; the director has since sworn off the
use of film for shooting all future productions).

Send 300-word abstract with a short C.V. to Daniel Burns at
dburns2_at_elon.edu by September 15, 2007.

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Received on Sun Aug 05 2007 - 16:00:23 EDT