Events

CONFERENCES, SYMPOSIA & WORKSHOPS

ROUNDTABLE AT The 2019 Conference of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures: ‘THE CRITICAL GROUND‘

Trinity College Dublin, 22-26 July 2019

The 2019 conference theme, ‘The Critical Ground’, is an invitation to reflect in the broadest possible terms on the critical traditions, interventions, controversies, and conversations which have shaped Ireland’s literature in both the Irish and English languages, and to chart the relationship between such critical engagement and Ireland’s wider political, cultural, and intellectual sphere.

Download abstract

Moore Institute Visiting Fellow TALK

NUI Galway, Moore Institute, 13 March 2019

Flavia Soubiran (Visiting Fellow) & Michaela Schrage-Früh (Mentor)

Key in the history of cinema, the ageing star is a figure of media obsolescence that carries the memory of a bygone era of filmmaking, awakening in the viewer nostalgia and anxiety, which the film industry continues to capitalize on. Building on her doctoral findings, Flavia’s research aims to analyze the strategies specific to the media of film in cultivating, subverting or reinscribing traditional tropes associated with contemporary ageing female stardom. This lecture will address the performativity of ageing in Hollywood and British film productions. All through classical Hollywood to the end of the Golden Age, movie stars (Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Rosalind Russell) displayed old age as an artistic act, an award-winning performance and a grandiose masquerade. The star’s ageing process is insistently narrated and staged as a grotesque, spectacular show. This characteristic treatment is questioned in a classical Hollywood reflexive sub-genre: the melodrama of the falling star. American and European directors are now reviving the falling star melodramatic themes in a contemporary context. To illustrate this rising melodramatic trend, this lecture will focus on the following performances by American and British ageing stars: Robin Wright in The Congress (2013), Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars (2014), Juliette Binoche in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Meryl Streep in Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), Annette Bening in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017), Kate Winslet in Wonder Wheel (2017) and Renée Zellweger in Judy (2019).