DISCOURSES of FICTIONAL (DIGITAL) TV SERIES

 Universitat de València

Forthcoming Conference

3-6 November 2020

Conference Convenors: Carmen Gregori-Signes, Claudia Alonso-Recarte, Miguel Fuster-Márquez, Sergio Maruenda-Bataller

 Secretaries: Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras & Joaquín Primo-Pacheco

We are delighted to announce that the Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya at the Universitat de València and the Institut Interuniversitari de Llengües Modernes Aplicades de la Comunitat Valenciana (IULMA) will be hosting, on the 3th-6th November 2020 in Valencia, Spain, the International Conference on Discourses of Fictional (Digital) TV Series. The conference will address series originally produced in English.

Popular culture has undoubtedly been influenced by TV series, shows and sitcoms ever since television became a commodity in the middle-class household. Such series epitomise the rich, diversified heritage of twentieth and twenty-first-century consumer culture, reflecting in one way or another the social and political scenario of their time. The ideas and concepts beneath successful series are the product of the times; and it is also the politics, financial demands and established ethos of such times that determine and often limit the direction of the show and the type of discourse it assimilates.

Although hit series have always drawn enthused groups of followers, fandom itself seems to have become an empowered phenomenon in the last decades and particularly in the last few years. Indeed, with the advent of personalised service that streaming media, downloading, and video-on-demand offer, our emotional and social connections to series have shifted. The fact that companies such as Netflix or Amazon have, following the footsteps of long-established public or cable channels such as HBO, ventured into producing their own original series or miniseries goes to show the extent to which (digital) TV series (DTVS) have gained momentum and are currently one of the most profitable initiatives in the entertainment industry. Substantial investments into quality script writing, casting, special effects, directing, editing, and marketing, among other procedures, have ultimately delivered to the public all sorts of audio-visual fictional narratives that address the concerns and interests of a highly diversified viewership that is constantly under the scrutiny of production companies. This cultural phenomenon has caught the attention of scholars who, from a range of disciplines, have approached the multi-signifying discursive significance that fictional DTVS, as stories and products, have in current society.

In line with such scholarship, this conference aims to create a space in which to analyse, discuss and debate the discursive and narrative aspects of fictional DTVS. We seek to explore how competing discourses enable or confront identity politics, how narrative structures implode viewer expectations, how genre conventions are reinvented through discourse and audio-visual rhetoric, and to ultimately delve into what such strategies say about English-speaking cultures and communities.

Conference topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Multimodal discourses in DTVS.
  • The function of dialogue and other forms of narrative in DTVS.
  • Characterisation. Innovations and stereotyping through characters’ unique discourse.
  • Identity politics based on race, ethnicity, religion, age, class, or species in DTVS.
  • Gender and sexuality in DTVS. The use of DTVS as an innovative space for raising awareness about social inequality
  • Sexual and gender-based politics. Denunciation of patriarchal discourses, feminist utopias and dystopias.
  • Posthuman, transhuman, biotechnological and ecocritical discourses in DTVS: the overcoming of humanism and the blurring of the boundaries between the human, the technological and the animal.
  • From Ageing to Disability Studies in DTVS: portrayals of old age, illness, disease, and the handicapped subject.
  • Screen adaptations. Conventional vs. experimental structures and narrative plots in DTVS.
  • Fandom-related discourses and industries.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE: cstonline.netcongresos.adeituv.es/series20/ficha.en.html

Submission of proposals will be through the website (beginning on Nov. 25, until Jan. 15).