Call for Submissions: "Expressing Emotion"
Posted Friday, March 23, 2012 2:26 PM
The Affect Project will sponsor a day-long symposium entitled “Expressing Emotion” on 2 May 2012 that will bring together students and researchers interested in all aspects of affect and its role in history, culture, and lived experience. The symposium will be organized as a series of roundtable discussions; participants will have seven minutes each to speak about their research interests or to address a particular problem or issue related to affect or to research about affect (for example, a theory about affect or emotion that would be useful for members of the Affect Project to consider). Topics could include, but are not limited to:
- affect and public policy
- memory, regret, nostalgia
- aesthetics and suicide
- affect and alienation
- affect and the power of images
If you are interested in participating, please send a brief statement about what you plan to contribute to the roundtable to Professor Arlene Young at Arlene.Young@ad.umanitoba.ca.
Deadline for submissions is April 13th, 2012.
Observers will be welcome at the symposium.
For more information, contact:
Arlene Young
Department Head
English, Film and Theatre
arlene.young@ad.umanitoba.ca
Phone: (204) 474-7145
Two Talks by Professor Steven Shaviro
Posted Wednesday, February 22, 2012 10:10 AM
I would like to invite students and members of the Arts faculty to two talks by Professor Steven Shaviro. They will be held on Monday, February 27 and Tuesday, February 28, immediately following reading week.
Professor Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He identifies himself as an American cultural critic. His many books of criticism and “theoretical fiction” have a broad interdisciplinary range. Among them are Post Cinematic Affect (2010) which explores “the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities”; Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and Aesthetics (2009); Connected,Or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society (2003); Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism (1997); The Cinematic Body (1993); and Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory (1990). Professor Shaviro’s talk will be in held in Dafoe Library Theatre on Monday, February 27 at 9:30 am. His topic will be how science fiction conceives, fictionalizes, and reflects upon current developments in biology. Professor Simone Mahrenholz will be moderating this event, as part of her Film and Contemporary Thought course. On Tuesday at 4:00pm, again in 160 Dafoe Library, Steven will be giving a talk on Lars Von Trier’s film, Melancholia, entitled “ Melancholia, or the Romantic Anti-Sublime.” An abstract for this presentation is presented below. Please make an effort to attend one or both talks. He is a critic and teacher of the first rank.
- George Toles
Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011) moves from domestic melodrama to cosmic catastrophe. It works as what used to be called a “women’s picture,” giving the portrait of a female character’s clinical depression when confronted with the prospect of a bourgeois family lifestyle. But the film also envisions the extermination of all life on Earth; this serves as a kind of objective correlative to the protagonist’s depression. In contrast to other recent apocalyptic films, however, Melancholia refuses to present the audience with a grandiose and sublime spectacle of mass destruction. Its apocalypse is disconcertingly intimate. Melancholia offers a deflationary view both of ongoing life and of its extinction.The film rejects conventional art-house standards of construction and form, with its disjunctive structure and its use of Dogme-style unsteady handheld camerawork. But Melancholia is also filled with Romantic allusions, from the music of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde on the soundtrack, to visual tableaux that recall Pre-Raphaelite paintings. It treats these allusions in a strangely distanced way, however, framing them as beautiful objects of contemplation in a manner that, for some viewers, might even seem to border on kitsch. In deploying this Romantic imagery, and reverting to a Romantic pessimism reminiscent of Leopardi and Schopenhauer, von Trier breaks away from the Modernist obsession with estrangement-effects, self-reflexivity, irony, and the “unpresentable” (cf. Lyotard). Against the Romantic and Modernist sublime, Melancholia offers an aesthetico-ontological vision of desolate beauty. In its reference to a certain side of German Idealism, its radical anti-anthropocentrism, and its entertainment of the thought of extinction, the film parallels recent developments in so-called “speculative realism.” But in its own right, Melancholia offers at least one possibility for a new aesthetics of the 21st century.
Filmmaking Workshop Series
Posted Tuesday, February 7, 2012 1:00 PM
The Film Studies Program presents a Filmmaking Workshop Series: Film industry professionals teach the technical methods of their craft.
All workshops will be held in Room 233 University College. Free of charge. Open to all English, Film and Theatre students.
Editing
Craig Guiboche
Thursday, February 9
4:30 - 7PM
Intro to After Effects
Craig Guiboce
Friday, February 10
9:00 - 12PM
Post-Production Audio Design and Audio Dialogue Replacement
Alan Braverman
Thursday, February 16
7:00 - 10:00pm
Conversation with a Director
Ervin Chartrand
Friday, February 17
9:00 - 12PM
Moderated by Jim Agapito (Film Technician) and Supported by the English Media Lab
Honours Reception
Posted Wednesday, February 1, 2012 1:00 PM
The Department of English, Film, and Theatre is holding an informal reception on Friday, March 2, from 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. for all current honours students and all students interested in entering the honours, advanced, or major programmes.
Please join us in the Haney Reading Room (627 Fletcher Argue Building) for coffee and snacks. Instructors and current honours students will be available to give you information about the honours programme and to answer your questions.
To enter the honours programme, students need to have a B or better in ENGL 1200 or ENGL 1300, or in both ENGL 1310 and ENGL 1340. Students can also enter honours in third year.
Feeling Canadian: Book Launch & Reading Featuring Marusya Bociurkiw
Posted Monday, January 30, 2012 1:37 PM
Feeling Canadian:
Book Launch & Reading
Featuring Toronto author, academic & activist Marusya Bociurkiw
Thursday Feb. 17, Aqua Books, 274 Garry Street, Winnipeg
Info: kelly@aquabooks.ca
Media contact: chitchens@wlu.ca
Free! Cash bar!
"My name is Joe, and I AM Canadian!" How did a beer ad become a national anthem? When did Olympic opening ceremonies become an advertisement for national superiority? What do toques and canoes have to do with nationalism?
Canadian couch potatoes need wonder no longer. This book by award-winning Toronto-based author, media theorist, filmmaker and professor Marusya Bociurkiw examines how affect (passionate sites of feeling) and consumerism work together to produce shows like Canada A Peoples' History, North of 60, and television coverage of the 2010 Olympics. As Canadian TV expert Michelle Byers writes, “Providing anecdotes that most readers will be very familiar with, Bociurkiw’s analysis situates us firmly within the context of our own uneasy, ambivalent, and sometimes embarrassing viewing pleasures.”
The author tracks the rise of nationalist content on Canadian television after the 1995 Quebec referendum, looking at how Canadian television works overtime to resolve the messy contradictions of nationhood. She closely examines the coverage of and aftermath to 9/11, when racial profiling became embedded in Canadian news. Drawing anecdotally upon televisually-mediated childhood memories, her Ukrainian background and more recent cross-media experiences, this book also makes use of humour and poetic writing.
With Canadian culture currently at the mercy of various election platforms and funding cuts, this timely book asks us to take a closer look at some of our most dearly-held nationalist assumptions. The proliferation of screens, the rise of social media and the ways in which audiences now move across platforms, open up, the author argues, opportunities for connection, empathy, and activism, and the creation of new post-national narratives on and off the TV screen.
Marusya Bociurkiw is the author of five books including Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl, an award winning literary memoir, and Halfway to the East, a collection of poetry. Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in many academic, arts and activist journals and books. She has been producing films and videos in Canada for the past fifteen years and those works have screened at film festivals and in cinemas on several continents. She is professor of media theory at Ryerson University in Toronto where she teaches courses on Canadian television, news theory, social media, and screen theory.
Two Funerals and a Nation: The Politics of Contagious Affect
Posted Monday, January 30, 2012 1:27 PM
The Department of English, Film and Theatre, and the Affect Research Cluster on Affect present Prof. Marusya Bociurkiw, from Ryerson University's School of Radio and Television Arts, who will give a talk on February 16, at 2:30 p.m., in the Haney Reading Room, 625 Fletcher Argue Building. The title of her talk is “Two Funerals and a Nation: The Politics of Contagious Affect.”
In her research on Canadian television, Prof. Bociurkiw examined the rise of affective nationalist content on Canadian television after the 1995 Quebec referendum, looking at how Canadian television worked overtime to resolve the messy contradictions of nationhood. She will talk about her application of affect theory to questions of national identity and nationalism, while also examining the death and state funeral of Jack Layton.
From television commentary to the chalk memorial at Toronto City Hall, she will track moments of embodied feeling – lumps in throats, watering eyes – on and off the small screen, and the ways in which the affects of sadness, grief, embarrassment, and pride became contagious as they mingled and transformed one another in the contact zones of kitchens, city squares, and even taxi cabs. Is this particular kind of collective, contagious affect that circulates around public figures antithetical to social change? Or can contagious national feeling move beyond the limits of electoral politics and nationalism? This talk will be accompanied by video clips and photographs.
Two Lectures by Professor Stephen Knight
Posted Monday, January 30, 2012 10:59 AM
The Department of English, Film and Theatre presents two lectures by Professor Stephen Knight, distinguished research professor, Cardiff University and University of Melbourne.
Wednesday, February 8
Robin Hood: International Outlaw
12:30pm, Cross Common Room, St. John's College
Reception to follow
Merlin, Wisdom and the Environment
7:30pm, Carol Shields Auditorium, Millenium Library
Black Hole Theatre Co. Lunch B.H.A.G.G. #4
Posted Monday, January 30, 2012 10:49 AM
The Black Hole Theatre Company University College LunchBhagg Series is pleased to present Sunday Costs Five Pesos as the fourth and final Lunch B.H.A.G.G. of the 2011/2012 season.
Sunday Costs Five Pesos is a romantic comedy set in Old Mexico. The story is about a woman’s attempt to win back her fiancé’s affection with the help of her two friends. But will Celestina, the “other”woman, get in her way? Find out in this steamy, Mexican, romantic comedy that is sure to get you laughing.
Featuring Logan M. Stefanson, Meaghan Labossiere, Ninia Ogbuji, Romana Suchy and Felicia Pulo. Directed by Justin Danyluk and Stage Managed by Daniel Chen.
Don’t miss this chance to see live theatre right here in your university. The show runs:
Tuesday Jan 31 – 12:00PM
Wednesday Feb 1 – 12:30PM & 7:30PM*
Thursday Feb 2 – 12:00PM
Admission to the daytime performances is free. Don’t forget to bring your lunch!
* Please note that evening performance on February 1st costs $1.00
Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw
Posted Monday, January 16, 2012 4:27 PM
First performed in 1894, Arms and the Man was Shaw’s first major success and it has become one of his most frequently produced works. Shaw identified the play as one of his “Pleasant” plays in that it deals “. . . less with the crimes of society, and more with its romantic follies and with the struggles of individuals against those follies. . . .”
The cast features some veterans of the University of Manitoba’s Theatre Program and the Black Hole Theatre Company and several actors who are making their debut with the Company.
Performances at the Gas Station Arts Centre, 445B River Ave. at Osborne St.
7:00 pm January 20, 21, 23-28th
2:00pm Matinees on January 21, 28th, and 29th
Tickets: $15 Adults, $12 Students and Senior