Call for Papers, Film Studies at CEA 2018

April 5-7, 2018 | St. Petersburg, Florida

Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront

333 1st St South, Saint Petersburg, Florida  33701 | Phone: (727) 894-5000

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Film Studies for our 49th annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org

BRIDGES FOR FILM

The bridge is a timeless image – as significant to engineering as to filmic metaphor. In screenplay writing the archetype of the bridge represents the transition from one psychological state to another. Traversing bodies of water, crossing bridges, blowing up bridges and bridging through escape tunnels are persistent tropes in film diegeses. Indeed, countless films have depicted the bridge as symbol for ‘crossing over’ from the ordinary to the special world (Vogler, 1992): as both demarcation of territories and conjoiner of ideologies. The word ‘bridge’ appears in film titles as powerful evocation of this psychic terrain from classic works of post-colonialism, such as Bridge on the River Kwai (Lean, 1957), to religious elicitations of the afterlife and its bitter irony such as the controversial documentary depicting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco: The Bridge (Steel, 2006).

Indeed, the bridge as symbol features in film theory’s (un-)timely bedfellow: psychoanalysis. Both Freud and Jung discussed bridges as symbols; the illusory psychic bridges built between the symbolic and the real in the Lacanian ‘impossible’ also features in film theory. Feminist and Queer film theories illuminate bridges between genders and sexualities formerly unacknowledged. The symbol as timeless signifier bridges the space between genres and figures in genre constructions from Romance (The Bridges of Madison County (Eastwood, 1995)) to the War Film (Dunkirk, (Nolan, 2017)) while the filmmaker/audience continuum features heavily as new horror theory bridges a formerly unperceived gap: the Sensorium. Bridging the ‘existential bond’ between: audience and film text; between directors, writers and actors; and between audience and filmmaker takes on new significance. Indeed, the very illusion of cinema depends on an unconscious bridge from sound to vision, where in games the sonic, visual and haptic combine via fragile bridges of perception. Yet despite this archetypical image, disciplinary and professional divisions still present themselves as truth claims. Contributors to the 2018 CEA conference are encouraged to unite in fortifying theory, practice and interdisciplinarity to consider (not limited to) the following:

• Connections between text and images or sound
• Digital humanities as a bridge between worlds

• Bridging gaps between traditional film theory and new theory

• The ‘impossible’ Bridge: The Lacanian Gap
• Pedagogical Bridges: The student/teacher interface/ teaching and scholarship
• Bridging gaps between disciplines – celebrity studies, literature and film studies
• Deconstructing Bridges
• The Maker-Audience Sensorium: Bridging the ‘existential bond’
• The Bridge as Cultural Icon: differing representations of Bridges in Transnational cinema
• The Anti-Bridge
• “Divided Cities” and bridging factional urban spaces
• Bridging Disciplines: Adapting the Novel to Film
• Psychic Bridges
• Transnational Bridges (Australia to USA)
• Transcultural Bridges
• Trans-Gender Bridges
• Interdisciplinary Bridges

Conference Theme

CEA welcomes proposals for presentations on the general conference theme: Bridges. The Sunshine Skyway Bridge crosses Tampa Bay from St. Petersburg, called the Sunshine City in honor of its Guinness Record for most consecutive days of sunshine (768). St. Petersburg is home to historic neighborhoods, distinguished museums, contemporary galleries, and a wide variety of dining, entertainment and shopping venues. St. Petersburg is also home to the College English Association’s 2018 national conference, where we invite you to join us at our annual meeting to explore the many bridges that connect places, texts, communities, words, and ideas.

CEA invites proposals from academics in all areas of literature, language, film, composition, pedagogy, and creative, professional, and technical writing. We are especially interested in presentations that build bridges between and among texts, disciplines, people, cultures, media, languages, and generations.

General Call for Papers

CEA also welcomes proposals for presentations in any of the areas English departments typically encompass, including literature criticism and scholarship, creative writing, composition, technical communication, linguistics, and film. We also welcome papers on areas that influence our work as academics, including student demographics, student/instructor accountability and assessment, student advising, academic leadership in departments and programs, and the place of the English department in the university.

Submission: August 15-November 1, 2017

For more information on how to submit, please see the full CFP at www.cea-web.org

Membership
All presenters at the 2018 CEA conference must become members of CEA by January 1, 2018. To join CEA, please go to www.cea-web.org

Other questions? Please email cea.english@gmail.com.

Sincerely,

Warm Regards

Dr Ian Dixon
Senior Lecturer & Unit Coordinator
SAE Institute & Qantm College 

SAE Institute Melbourne Campus
235 Normanby Rd
South Melbourne VIC 3205 Australia

+61 (0) 3 8632 3400   | Phone
+61 (0) 3 8632 3401   | Fax
i.dixon@sae.edu