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In common parlance, “melodrama” often denotes unsophisticated and exaggerated middlebrow narratives that appeal to the sympathies of their audiences by inciting heightened emotional responses. While Peter Brooks’s seminal The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) established melodrama as an important feature of modernist literary expression, the term continues to be employed in a variety of ways across various fields of study including literature, film, television, theater, music and even political theory (e.g., Elisabeth Anker’s recent book, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom).

 

But what, if anything, unites scholarly engagements with melodrama? And how and why does melodrama continue to be an important and prolific mode of cultural and artistic expression? Many melodramatic narratives have been invoked throughout history, ones that arguably recur in today’s world: such as those that consider or insist on what makes one a good citizen; the necessary expansion of state power to defend against villainous threats to nation, home and family; idealized gender roles and the making of good domestic subjects; the aspiration to and the disappointment in middle class life; and what it means to be truly free when unfreedom seems to be a constitutive element of society. Considering too how melodrama has been referred to and used to dismiss the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and how recent allegations of widespread sexual assault on college campuses are quickly subject to scrutiny and often dismissed as hysterical or overstated, we think melodrama is an important topic to discuss now.

 

For this conference, we are interested in fostering an interdisciplinary discussion in order to productively complicate and expand theorizations of melodrama and to explore how the concept works to categorize and/or illuminate a variety of cultural and artistic texts.  To this end, we are interested in melodrama as a historicized genre and as a mode or critical tool that may be used to examine such notions as affect, subject position (class; race; gender; sexuality), and experiences of capitalism and globalization.

 

This event is co-sponsored by: Film Studies, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, the Women’s Studies Research Center, the Theater Department, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Graduate Student Association, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

 

 

SPECIAL THANK YOU TO:

 

Graduate students: Jake Burg, Morgan Blair, Courtney Pina Miller, Paige Eggebrecht, Margot Kotler, Haram Lee, Hanh Bui, Daniella Gati, Emily Fine, Michael Mirer, Jennifer Thomas, Jeanna Kadlec, and Megan Finch

 

Faculty: John Plotz, Susan Lanser, Mary Baine Campbell, Kyle Stevens, Ulka Anjaria, Faith Smith, and Tom King

 

Staff: Lisa Pannella and Rebecca Mahoney