The Program in Literature at Duke University

Skip to content Skip to navigation

Program in Literature

Box 90670

101 Friedl Bldg.

Durham, NC 27708

919-684-4127

Upcoming Events:

Gregg Flaxman

“Out of Field: The Future of Film Studies”

Thursday, January 21, 2010

4:30pm

Upper East Side, East Union Building

While every discipline in the humanities worries about its future, film studies entertains a particular anxiety: today, the field confronts the possibility that it lacks a consistent object and a compelling reason. Behind the question of film studies looms the question of cinema itself, an aging techne, in the midst of new(er) media that lay claim to the image as their province and power. Why cinema? Most recently, James Cameron’s Avatar seems to have provided a rejoinder to this skepticism, but this talk contends that the reason to return to the cinema, far from consisting in the promise of an immersive spectacle, can be grasped in light (or lieu) of what the film effaces—the off-screen or what Gilles Deleuze calls the "outside of the image.”

Gregory Flaxman is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. The editor of The Brain is the Screen (Minnesota, 2000), he is the author of a two volume study of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of fabulation, Powers of the False, and co-editor of a two volume anthology, The Film Philosopher Reader (all forthcoming from Minnesota). He is currently writing a monograph on Chinatown.

For more information, please contact Maria Maschauer

at 684-5255.