[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Sense of an Ending in Contemporary Television (9/15/06; NEMLA, 3/1/07-3/4/07)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

The Sense of an Ending in Contemporary Television

The Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention (NEMLA)
Baltimore, Maryland
March 1-4, 2007

This panel is invested in a narratological approach to understanding the
ways in which contemporary television resolves itself—how the serial
structure of television arrives at its teleological end. While
television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Six Feet Under, and Sex
and the City have, in the last few years, offered a type of master
narrative in their weaving and unraveling of years of narrative arcs,
shows that are cancelled (even a show as well conceived and crafted as
Firefly and Arrested Development) are, in essence, incessant as their
final episodes are often never aired. Adding another layer to the
complexities of endings in contemporary television is syndication, a
forever-presentation and remembrance of prior storylines.

Serial television, as a distinct form that is dependent upon continuity
and cohesion (where ruptures and splits become demonstrative and even
problematic), demonstrates particular concerns about narrative structure
and form. As contemporary television is a product of postmodernity,
poststructuralist and postmodernist theories enable us to understand
what is at stake in constructing, sustaining, and ultimately ceasing
narrative structure. Papers will examine the ways in which the endings
of contemporary television series reflect literary postmodernisms in
narrative structure and design, what they have to say about resolution,
closure, a larger structure of meaning. Is cohesion ever a possibility
in this form, in this time? Approaches may include (but are not limited
to) studies of specific television series, analyses of trends in
contemporary series, explorations of corollaries between television and
novelistic representations. Ultimately, this panel is invested in
exploring how endings make meaning by resolving the tensions beneath the
surface of narrative or perhaps by failing to end at all.

Deadline for 1-2 page abstracts is September 15, 2006. Please send them
via email along with your vitae to Dr. Lisa Perdigao at lperdiga at fit.edu
or in hard copy to

Dr. Lisa K. Perdigao
Department of Humanities and Communication
Florida Institute of Technology
150 West University Blvd.
Melbourne, FL 32901-6975

All accepted panelists must be NEMLA members. For more information about
the convention see http://www.nemla.org.






-- 
Lisa K. Perdigao, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Department of Humanities and Communication
Florida Institute of Technology
150 W. University Blvd.
Melbourne, FL 32901-6975
321.674.8370

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