MCLC: Comedy and Comedy Criticism in Chinese Cinema--cfp

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Comedy and Comedy Criticism in Chinese Cinema–cfp
Special Issue of Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2018)
To observers of Chinese cinemas, it has become increasingly clear that we are witnessing a growing “comedy boom” in the recent decade. It confronts us with not only questions about this particular production cycle, but also the neglected issues about comedy in the history of Chinese cinemas, and indeed the need for a robust comedy criticism in film studies in general. Compared to other major film genres (melodrama, Western, etc.), comedy has yet to be adequately conceptualized and historicized. There might be many reasons for this, from the notoriously elusive aesthetic concept of humor to the impossibly broad genre label of film comedy. Yet questions about film comedy still must be asked, and a good place to start might be precisely specific local genre operations and historical discourse formations. We will take comedy’s high resistance to overarching interpretative models to suggest an invitation to innovative methodology, theoretical discretion, and rigorous historical research. In this sense, the recent Chinese comedy boom calls for engaging comedy criticism with renewed urgency.
This special issue aims to showcase a wide spectrum of new research on film comedies in Chinese Cinemas. The guest editors, Xinyu Dong and Jonathan Rosenbaum, would like to solicit abstracts for articles related to the theme of this special issue, which takes advantage of the broad category of genre criticism to bridge multiple concerns, from the overall economy of national or regional cinemas to the formal structures of individual films. Given the heightened intertextual play in comedy films, comparative and interdisciplinary work on traveling genres across historical periods, film cultures and artistic media are especially welcome. Possible topics include but are not limited to: histories of comedy filmmaking practices in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and diasporic areas (e.g. genre cycles, filmmakers, styles); transnational aspects of film comedy production, distribution, and reception; historical local discourses about film comedy; contested theoretical concepts in comedy criticism (e.g. realism, formalism, modernism, postmodernism); film comedy and comic media culture.
Please send 250-300 word abstracts (as PDF by email attachment) by January 31, 2017 to both Xinyu Dong (xinyudng at gmail.com) and Jonathan Rosenbaum (jrosenbaum2002 at yahoo.com); if abstract is selected, authors will be invited to submit full manuscripts (6000-8000 words, due May 31, 2017) for consideration of inclusion in the special issue. Anticipated publication date of the special issue is Spring 2018.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on January 17, 2017
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center
To stop receiving these emails, click here.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20170117/07e8e8b5/attachment.html>