CFP: Feeling Character Spaces (NeMLA, April 12-15, 2018, Pittsburgh)

Joshua Gooch Discussion
Type: 
Call for Papers
Date: 
September 30, 2017
Location: 
New York, United States
Subject Fields: 
Cultural History / Studies, Film and Film History, Humanities, Literature, Popular Culture Studies

CFP: Feeling Character Spaces

49th Annual Northeast MLA Conference: "Global Spaces, Local Landscapes and Imagined Worlds"

Omni William Penn, Pittsburgh, PA

April 12-15, 2018

 

This session considers the affective politics of form in relation to fictional characters. Our relation to spatiality comes via narrative theory’s notion that characters occupy a particular narrative space shaped by the relationships between major and minor characters, and that they are themselves formed and deformed by these spaces. This argument thus allows literary scholars to think about the politics of spatial inclusion and exclusion at the level of textual form. Yet it also leaves untouched the affective qualities of characterization. The question, then, is how do different forms of narrative space solicit different modes of affective engagement with characters. To what degree do the narrative spaces of characterization encourage or discourage affective encounters, either between characters or for readers? And to what degree may narrative spaces of characterization create the kinds of asubjective and formal possibilities for affect?

  • How do affective charges operate between major and minor characters in eighteenth-century, Romantic, Victorian, Edwardian, modernist, or postmodern texts, e.g., from sentimental novels with their staging of scenes of sympathy (Goldsmith, Sterne, Rousseau, Mackenzie, etc.) to the push and pull of identification and judgment in writers like Conrad and Ford, and beyond?   
  • How do minor characters solicit intensities, emotions, or other modes of feeling through their minorness, e.g., Agnes in The Monk, or the man who feeds the fire and shelters Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop? 
  • How may genre function in the creation of character space and affect, e.g., how does form in Gothic fiction create affects in constructing its minor characters? 
  • How may film create narrative space for its characters to encourage affective encounters or the production of affective forms? Film of the late 1990s and early 2000s used minor characters to produce branching narratives and contrasting affects (Run Lola Run being the example par excellence).
  • How has contemporary visual culture (including television) explored new possibilities in constructing affective spaces for minor characters? Perhaps the most obvious example involves a move from minor to major character with the move from Breaking Bad to Better Call Saul. How do such shifts operate?

Please submit abstracts to https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/login.

Contact Info: 

Joshua Gooch

D'Youville College

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