Archive for 2011

[Previous message][Next message][Back to index]

[ecrea] Not Another Teen Film: Historical Essays on American Cinema and Youth

Mon Nov 07 14:03:26 GMT 2011



Call for Chapter:

/Not Another Teen Movie: Historical Essays on American Cinema and Youth/

Solicited is a single chapter of around 6,000 words (plus bibliography) to complete the line-up of a proposed edited collection of essays provisionally entitled /Not Another Teen Movie: Historical Essays on American Cinema and Youth. /A synopsis of the collection is included below. Currently, the collection boasts fourteen chapters from an international group of leading scholars in the field. The chapter itself is needed for a section provisionally entitled “Production Trends”.

The chapter would ideally observe the following guidelines:

1. The chapter is to focus on a youth-oriented and/or youth-centred production trend or film cycle that in the main unfolded between the years 1950 and 1967.

2. The development(s) upon which the chapter focuses may either be principally a product of activity from within the American film industry or may be mainly or exclusively the product of a non-American industry or film industries having engaged with some aspect of American youth film culture, be that output, content, or the American youth as a target market.

3. The chapter must either bring to light a trend or cycle hitherto neglected or marginalized in Anglophone film historiography or shed new light on a previously examined trend or cycle.

4. The chapter is to be the product of film historical approaches and methods.

5. The chapter will be anchored to sophisticated understandings of the relationships between industry practice, content and themes, and output.

6. The chapter will not have been published previously.

Abstracts of 200-400 words plus an up-to-date academic bio of 50-100 words are to be submitted as soon as possible in PDF or Word form to (richard_nowell /at/ hotmail.com) <mailto:(richard_nowell /at/ hotmail.com)>

Yours Sincerely,

Dr. Richard Nowell (editor)

*_ _*

*_Synopsis_*

The relationships between American cinema and youth have been complex, shaping in diverse ways film production, distribution, exhibition, reception, and appropriation. Broadly speaking, the American youth market has long since been recognized as the engine driving the American movie business, with efforts to appeal to the hearts, minds, and pockets of young people underwriting the conduct of creative and commercial personnel operating in Hollywood, across the American independent sector, and even based overseas (see Doherty; Nowell). It can also be said that, as highly committed yet supposedly impressionable consumers, young people – Americans or otherwise – have featured prominently in public sphere discourse, often as the objects of adult concerns over their alleged susceptibility to the apparent rabble-rousing, stupefying or narcotizing effects of consuming too much, or the “wrong kind” of American cultural product (see Biltereyst). Conversely, American cinema is understood as a youth-friendly cinema that plays important roles in the lives of many young people across the globe (see Meers). Such points notwithstanding, the specific character of these relationships remains loosely sketched and is currently supported by only a handful of case studies. This situation has arisen in part because scholarly attention has tended to be focused towards on-screen images of young Americans and towards diagnosing certain teenpics, fads, and representational tropes as symptoms of the broader psychological, social, and political backdrops against which they took form (see Lewis; Shary). An inevitable by-product of the longstanding and continued pre-eminence of such approaches in both scholarly and popular circles (see Bernstein) has been the erection of canons of touchstone films and trends as well as the dissemination of reductive notions of youths as malleable consumers, which, as a whole, have served to erase many of the nuances characterizing this rich and multifaceted aspect of cinema history. Developing new lines of enquiry into the intersections of youth and American cinema is therefore both salient and timely; Not Another Teen Movie aims to do so through a series of case studies, characterized by the application of the diverse theoretically-underpinned, empirically researched approaches known collectively as the New Film History (see Chapman, Glancy, and Harper), that is intended to broaden understandings of, shed new light on, and make substantial revisions to, this key area of cinema studies. Accordingly, Not Another Teen Movie brings together essays written by scholars from around the globe, all exploring the historical dimensions of American cinema and youth across the twentieth century and into the new millennium, both in American film culture as well as in other national contexts.

Richard Nowell teaches American Cinema at Charles University in Prague. He is the author of /Blood Money a History of the First Teen Slasher Film /Cycle, has served as a guest editor of /Iluminace: The Journal of Film Theory, History, and Aesthetics/, and his articles have been published or are forthcoming in, among others, /Cinema Journal/, /Journal of Film and Video/, /Post Script/, and /The New Review of Film and Television Studies./



[Previous message][Next message][Back to index]