CFP: (Re-)mediating the Unconscious
Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism
CFP: Volume 30 (2023)
Edited by Maria Poulaki (Aristotle University) & Adriano D’Aloia (University of Bergamo)
Deadline for abstract proposals: November 15, 2023
Screen media and notably cinema have been linked, in theory as well as in the cultural imagination, with non-conscious and preconscious states, as well as with shifts in consciousness. From the early association of cinema with hypnosis, to the 1950s debate over “subliminal messages” contained in advertising, film and other media, the way media can attune to what rests beneath the level of conscious awareness remains an area of intense popular as well as theoretical fascination. The scholarly study of cinema has addressed and cultivated the relation between the medium and the unconscious – from Benjamin’s association of film with the “optical unconscious” in the 1930s, to the sweeping influence of psychoanalysis on film theory in the 1970s, connecting cinema with …