The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship
Thursday 25th March 2010
A one-day conference hosted by the Film and Literature Programme of the Department of English in association with the Centre for Modern Studies
In the past decade or so there has been a marked resurgence in the popularity of the literary biopic. Writers turned subjects of recent films include Shakespeare, Austen, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, Kafka, Keats, Kaufman and many more, both fictional and historical. This cultural phenomenon prompts a re-examination of a long and varied history of cinematic engagements with literary lives, literary processes and other forms of authorial creativity, both historical and fictional.
View the Final Writers on Film Conference Programme.
Confirmed speakers
Confirmed speakers include Andrew Higson, Deborah Cartmell, Pamela Church Gibson, Julian North, Geoff Wall, Ian Hunter, Erica Sheen, and Judith Buchanan.
Attending the conference
To reserve a non-speaking delegate place, send your name and institutional affiliation in an email, subject line 'Conference Reservation: The Writer on Film', to: film-and-literature@events.york.ac.uk.
Confirmation of conference places and registration details will be sent out subsequently.
Abstracts and proposals
The deadline for submitting abstracts has now passed.
Questions informing case-studies might include (without being limited to):
- What appeal have literary lives and literary process historically held for the film industry?
- How are the processes of creativity and creation in one medium narratable through the codes and conventions of another?
- At what moments in film history (and film present) have particular writers proved cinematically modish, and how has their modishness been cinematically appropriated?
- Do the cultural and commercial operations of literary biopics differ from those of literary adaptations?
- How have different genres of writing (poetry, novelistic, dramatic, journalistic, screen-writing) been treated by the film industry in different periods?
- How might screen representations of acts of writing relate to screen representations of other expressions of creative/artistic endeavour (fine art, musical composition etc)?
- What approach to the material tools of literary composition (ink, quill, pen, typewriter, computer, paper, desk etc) has the camera adopted in different films and at different moments?
- How do audience engagements with fictional writers as film characters compare with audience engagements with historical writers as film characters?
- How might the formal and/or cultural challenges with which literary biopics have engaged relate to those attendant upon a work of literary biography?