Reminder – Call for chapters: Call Me by Your Name edited collection

deadline for submissions: 
July 13, 2020
full name / name of organization: 
Dr. Edward Lamberti and Professor Michael Williams

Reminder – Call for chapters:

Call Me by Your Name edited collection

 

Editors: Edward Lamberti and Michael Williams

 

We hope everyone is staying safe and well during these difficult times.

The film Call Me by Your Name (2017), adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino, has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its release. A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer), and set in 1983 “Somewhere in northern Italy”, as an opening caption tells us, Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures, prejudices or tragedy. While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen, its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. And yet the film is abundantly infused with narrative, thematic and stylistic elements that can be read as speaking powerfully to questions of sexual identity for modern audiences. We believe this ravishing and complex film warrants wider study.

We are therefore planning an edited collection on Call Me by Your Name. We would like to address how the film helps inform our understanding of contemporary sexual identity and romance. To what extent does it focus on Elio and Oliver’s relationship specifically and to what extent does it tell a more generalised love story? What tensions exist between the specific and the general, between the open and the hidden, between the past and the present? We are looking for chapters that will interrogate these questions in exciting and thought-provoking ways.

The film has struck a chord with so many viewers. With this wide appeal in mind, we invite proposals for chapters of 6,000-8,000 words from established scholars, early-career researchers and students. Chapters could include the following topics, individually or in combination:

  • Call Me by Your Name as a romance
  • Depictions of sexuality, gender and religious identity in the film
  • Call Me by Your Name in relation to contemporary LGBTQ+ cinema
  • Call Me by Your Name as an adaptation of André Aciman’s novel
  • The place of Call Me by Your Name in director Luca Guadagnino’s body of work
  • Call Me by Your Name and the work of James Ivory
  • Call Me by Your Name and heritage cinema
  • Analysis of the film style of Call Me by Your Name
  • Analysis of specific scenes from the film
  • Call Me by Your Name and the era of its story (political, economic, spectre of AIDS pandemic)
  • Uses of the past/looking back, within the film and in relation to the film itself
  • Call Me by Your Name and antiquity
  • Production design in the film (e.g. 1980s, summer villa, Italy, towns, countryside, seclusion and openness)
  • Marketing and distribution, critical reception, and audience/fan responses
  • Analysis of Timothée Chalamet’s performance and emerging stardom
  • Armie Hammer’s role in the film – the star as character actor
  • Music in Call Me by Your Name (classical, 1980s, Sufjan Stevens’ original songs)
  • Future directions of the story, such as the ‘unused’ sections of the novel and Aciman’s new sequel, Find Me (2019)

If you wish to propose a chapter, please send a 300-word proposal along with a 100-word biography to Edward Lamberti and Michael Williams at cmbyncollection@gmail.com. If you have any queries during the preparation of your proposal, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

The closing date for receipt of chapter proposals is Monday 13 July 2020. We will select the proposals that we feel will make the best combination for the collection. We will inform all those who have sent us proposals of the outcome of the selection process by Monday 3 August. We would like the selected contributors to write their chapters by Monday 18 January 2021.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Edward Lamberti and Michael Williams

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/film/about/staff/mtw1.page

https://kcl.academia.edu/EdwardLamberti