The next session of the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar will take place on Wednesday 18th March, 6.00-7.30pm, Senate House, London, room 261.
We’re very pleased to have Professor Laura Marcus join us to give a paper entitled, ‘Silence, sound and city films and fictions of the 1920s and 1930s’.
Abstract:
This talk uses examples of late silent and early sound films (including F.W.Murnau’s Sunrise and Paul Fejos’s Lonesome) to explore the relationship between the visual and the aural in the cinema of the period, and the charged role played by representations of urban modernity in this context. It closes with brief discussion of novels (including works by Woolf, Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton) in which relationships between silence and sound are played out in literary terms.
Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her book publications include The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007) and Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014). Current research projects include a study of the concept of ‘rhythm’ in interdisciplinary contexts (with a focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and a book on literature and the cinema, which looks in particular at the relationship between writing and the silent/sound transition in film.
For more details and for information about other sessions, see: https://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com. You can also follow us on Twitter @Litviscult.
Sarah Chadfield and Sophie Oliver
(Royal Holloway, University of London)
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