[ecrea] 'Regarding the Pleasure of Others' work - call for proposals

*Call for proposals to participate in the workshop:*

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*Regarding the Pleasure of Others*

*Entertainment and the Popular in World Cinemas*

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*Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds*

*24 March 2016*

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*Proposal deadline: 30 October 2015*

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*Organizers: *Shoba Ghosh (Professor and Head of English, Uni. of Mumbai)

Alan O’Leary (Associate Professor, Centre for World Cinemas and Digital
Cultures, Uni. of Leeds)

Popular films are deeply pleasurable artefacts. Despite pioneering work
by writers as different as Richard Dyer, Henry Jenkins, Carl Plantinga,
Matt Hills and others, a suspicious account of pleasure continues to
preside. Art-house cinema will often disavow pleasure (for example, in
the form of slow cinema or the ‘feel-bad’ film) in the name of ethics, a
move typically validated by critics. Pleasure tends to be understood as
the means by which dubious ideologies are imparted, by which inequality
is naturalized, and by which the individual is interpellated as an
oppressed subject. When pleasure is not assumed to be perforce
politically or ethically negative, it tends to be perceived as
supplementary to the real matter, or is presented as facile (as in
Barthes’ hierarchical opposition between /plaisir/ and /jouissance/).
Diminishing or second-order accounts of pleasure such as these seem
inadequate to the diversity and complexity of the pleasurable
relationships with, and use of popular cinema in different historical,
cultural, economic and geographical settings.If the institutions of
fiction allow audiences to apprehend film in contexts of social
convention and play, the particularity of those contexts need to be
articulated and analysed in relation to the pleasures they facilitate.

The workshop *Regarding the Pleasure of Others*is designed to take
forward a sympathetic reconceptualization of the pleasures of popular
film. It will do so in terms of a ‘glocal’ rethinking of pleasure, where
the distinctiveness of the entertainment provided by regional and
national film cultures is recognized even as the transnational character
of film aesthetics, production and consumption is borne in mind. (We are
concerned to avoid ‘unthinking Eurocentrism’ and an excessive focus on
Hollywood.)

The workshop will be an intimate event, taking place over a single day.
Each session will feature a number of short position papers or informal
presentations dealing with a particular theme, context, methodological
question etc., with a respondent and plenty of time for debate. A
closing roundtable will include discussion of plans for publication of
the proceedings as a special section of an issue of /New Cinemas:
Journal of Contemporary Film/.

Proposals for participation are invited that address any of the
following topics in relation to popular cinema, though the list is not
intended to be exhaustive:

·Methodologies for the study of pleasure

·The forms of pleasure in different contexts and cultures

·The historical study of pleasure

·Pleasure and questions of identity, gender, age (including children’s
pleasure) etc.

·Queer pleasures

·Individual and communal experiences of pleasure

·Pleasure and cultural capital, including cinephilia, cult and ‘guilty’
pleasures

·Current cognitivist work on the pleasures of popular film

·Pleasure and the erotic or pornographic

·Critiques of the status of pleasure in discourse

*Please write with proposals for position papers to
**(a.oleary /at/ leeds.ac.uk)* <mailto:(a.oleary /at/ leeds.ac.uk)>*with ‘Pleasure
workshop’ in the subject line and include a CV, title/theme and abstract
of no more than 300 words.***

*Deadline for proposals: 30 October 2015*

Proposals will be considered after this date and participants invited by
end-November.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alan O'Leary

Director of Research and Innovation

School of Languages, Cultures and Societies

University of Leeds,

Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

http://leeds.academia.edu/AlanOLeary/

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