[ecrea] Call for Papers: Regarding the Pleasure of Others - Entertainment and the Popular in World Cinemas

*Call for proposals to participant in the workshop:*

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*Regarding the Pleasure of Others*

*Entertainment and the Popular in World Cinemas*

**

*Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds*

*24 March 2016*

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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 and Henry Jenkins a
pathologizing account of pleasure continues to preside. Thus 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/). In
the opinion of the workshop organizers, the pathologizing or
‘diminishing’ account of pleasure is inadequate to the diversity and
complexity of the pleasurable relationships with popular cinema in
different historical, cultural, economic and geographical contexts.

The workshop *Regarding the Pleasure of Others*is designed to begin an
essential and 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 publication plans of the
proceedings.

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, including pleasure in the past

·The forms of pleasure in different contexts and cultures

·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, fan, cult and
‘guilty’ pleasures

·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.

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Alan O'Leary
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT UK
Tel: +44 (0)113-3433633

/Associate Professor in Italian /http://leeds.academia.edu/AlanOLeary
/Research website
/http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/italian-cinemas-italian-histories/

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