CFP: The Art of Modern Time: Film and the Representation of Temporality

Submission deadline: January 11, 2019

Conference date(s):
April 4, 2019 - April 6, 2019

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Conference Venue:

Interdisciplinary Studies, Gettysburg College
Gettysburg, United States

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Details

Gettysburg College Philosophy and Film Seminar

 “The Art of Modern Time: Film and the Representation of Temporality”

Call for Abstracts

April 4 – 6, 2019

Seminar Director: Vernon W. Cisney,

Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Gettysburg College

Keynote Speaker:

Lutz Koepnick, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of German, Cinema and Media Arts, Vanderbilt University

Recent books include Michael Bay: World Cinema in the Age of Populism; The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous; and On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary.

The Gettysburg College Interdisciplinary Studies Program, in cooperation with the Cinema and Media Studies Program and the Philosophy Department, are delighted to announce the 4th annual meeting of the Gettysburg College Philosophy and Film Seminar, entitled “The Art of Modern Time: Film and the Representation of Temporality.” Few human experiences are more familiar and universal, but simultaneously more perplexing and paradoxical, than time. And no art form possesses the ability to explore these paradoxes as intrinsically as the art of cinema. Referred to by director Andrei Tarkovsky as ‘sculpting in time,’ film presents us with images and experiences of transformative emotional depth, distortions of our time, variations of the past, present, and future, and visions of a world to come. The question of time in cinema therefore provides multiple avenues of theoretical exploration and analysis, from the philosophical to the cultural, economic, sociological, theological, aesthetic, and psychological.

The Gettysburg College Philosophy and Film Seminar will be held on the campus of Gettysburg College in historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, just one hour from Baltimore and ninety minutes from Washington, D.C. The vision of the seminar is to provide an intimate setting where collegial and rigorous intellectual enrichment of an interdisciplinary nature can take place. In the true spirit of the liberal arts, we invite submissions of abstracts from across the spectrum of academic disciplines.

Suggested questions include, but are not limited to, the following:

-        Does film hold unique possibilities for original ontologies?

-        In what ways can cinematic time challenge our presuppositions about selfhood?

-        What conceptual purposes can non-linear narratives serve? 

-        In line with Deleuze’s cinematic taxonomy, have recent directors created new time-images?

-        What is the connection between the current state of the cinema and our situatedness within the time of late capitalism or the anthropocene?

Seminar Details and Submission Instructions

Dates and Events: The seminar will take place on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, April 4 – 6, 2019. In addition to the seminar sessions, there will be a public presentation by Gettysburg College Professor of Philosophy, Steve Gimbel; a public keynote address delivered by Professor Lutz Koepnick from Vanderbilt University; a Gettysburg College Student Panel, titled ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel’; and a public film screening. To ensure the intimate collegiality of the event, we will accept no more than twelve participants to the seminar. For this reason, we ask that seminar participants plan to attend all associated events over the course of April 5 and 6, and you are encouraged to attend Professor Gimbel’s public presentation on the evening of the 4th as well.

Format: To optimize intellectual enrichment, the primary format of the seminar will be discussion, as opposed to presentation. Accepted papers will be collected and distributed to seminar participants one week prior to the seminar, to allow a basic familiarity with the arguments in advance. The participant’s allotted time at the seminar will then be forty-five minutes, ten of which will be devoted to the presentation of key passages and elements of the argument. The remaining thirty-five minutes will be dedicated entirely to discussion. With this in mind, in preparing an abstract, participants should think in the direction of approximately 12-15 pages for their papers.

Travel and Costs: There is no registration fee for the seminar, and shuttle transportation to and from either Dulles airport in Washington, D.C. or BWI in Baltimore will be provided at no cost to seminar participants. In addition to light breakfasts, there will be light snacks, lunches, and dinners provided on the days of the seminar (April 5 & 6). As the events span the entirety of both days, participants traveling by air will want to plan to arrive on April 4 and depart on April 7, though we also encourage extending your stay should you wish to visit the battlefield or the Gettysburg National Cemetery. The GCPFS has blocked rooms at a conference rate, discounted for seminar participants, at the Gettysburg Hotel in the heart of downtown Gettysburg, just a few blocks from campus.

Please submit detailed abstracts of no more than 600 words, in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format, to the seminar director, Vernon Cisney, at [email protected], no later than January 11, 2019. Any questions may be so directed as well. In the abstract, please include title, author name and institutional affiliation, and contact information.

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