More Calls for Papers: Vampires, Erotic Adaptations and Serial Narratives

Vegetarians, VILFs and Fang-Bangers: Modern Vampire Romance in print and on screen, 24 November 2010

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Vampires have had a long and complex relationship with human beings and have been threatening and attracting us through folklore, literature, film and television for centuries. But now they walk among us, seeking to integrate themselves into our culture, to be our business partners, friends and lovers. Why do we now prefer our vampires with a sensitive nature or with their ruthlessness focused on business deals? How does this change affect the relationship between both species and genders? This one-day conference seeks to understand and criticise the phenomenal popularity of what is sometimes termed Dark Romance. Papers are sought on authors such as Stephanie Meyers, Charlene Harris, and Laurell K. Hamilton, the adaptation of Dark Romance books for both film and TV and a general consideration of the change in our relationship with the vampire.

Deadline for abstracts: 8th September 2010. More details.

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Erotic Adaptations One-Day Symposium (26 January 2011)

Centre for Adaptations, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Proposals are invited for papers on erotic and sexually explicit adaptations and appropriations, from film versions of erotic classics such as Justine, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Story of O to contemporary slash fiction and porn parodies. The focus will be on screen adaptations but papers are welcome on graphic novels, novelisations, video mashups, photography, manga, book illustrations, radio and video games.

Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2010. More details.

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Serial Narratives and Temporality

NeMLA Convention 2011, Rutgers University

The serial principle has a important influence on contemporary culture: novels, movies and television shows, comic books, video games, etc. are published in series. Consequently, this principle largely informs contemporary ways of conceiving, producing and making sense of narratives in general. This panel wants to locate the importance of seriality within our present-day mediascape.
It is interesting to see that, while individual studies of mostly 19th-century serial novels and 20th-century television shows are available in large numbers, the phenomenon of serialization has rarely been acknowledged as a medial practice that informs contemporary culture as a whole. [...]

In order to create a comprehensive theoretical framework for the various serial practices, this panel will focus on the concept of temporality. Many series experiment with narrative time. The individual episodes/installments/posts allow for the most diverse temporal structures: continuous, constellatory, reverse or cyclical. Time stretching, acceleration as well as ‘real time’ are integral parts of recent narrative experiments. What can we learn from these experiments about the ways in which we conceive time and about how these notions are expressed in narrative?

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2010. More details.

Sarah on Structure

Sarah's written a post for Romancing the Blog which puts her recent post about the structure of Suzanne Brockmann's Breaking Point into a wider context:

it’s worth digging under the surface. When reading a book, it’s hopefully easy to fall into a story (that’s the point, right?) and not think about how much thought goes into how it’s constructed. Reading accounts of RWA and listening to authors, however, tells us how much authors think about their books, how many times they revise, how they agonize over the phrasing of one sentence to get just the right meaning. And while it’s important that we just fall into a book, we can also discover a lot ABOUT the book and its themes and message, if we focus on the deeper meanings of how its actually put together.

The illustration is a model of the structure of a glucose chain. It's from Wikimedia Commons. More details about glucose and the different structures it can take can be found here.

Brockmann's narrative construction

Sarah S. G. Frantz

I'm reading my way through Suzanne Brockmann's Troubleshooter series again. This is actually the first time that I've read them book after book after book (up to thirteen now with Into the Fire released last month). And doing so is instructive. I've noticed two things in particular.

First, is particular to Breaking Point (TS#9). This book has always bothered me and I've only read it once before. It's very confusing at until about half way through, because rather than having clearly separate World War II stories, as she does in TS#1-6 and TS#8, the flashbacks in Breaking Point are all to much more contemporary memories of Max and Gina's relationship. But it's not just flashbacks to 18 months ago, it also flashes to 4 months ago, 22 months ago, seven months ago, 17 months ago, 19 months ago, seemingly randomly. All of which makes the book very confusing to start and difficult to figure out. But as the action gets further along, the flashbacks drift away so that the action all takes place in the present.

Brockmann writes so cleanly and so beautifully, and her plotting is so perfect, I've never been able to figure out why she had done this to Breaking Point. This time I got it. Max's problem is his struggle to control the chaos in his head. And while he is separated from Gina in the "Present Day," the book is chaotic in and with the flashbacks. But as Max and Gina get closer to their HEA, as Max's mind calms down and accepts his feelings for Gina, as he accepts the chaos in his head, the book calms down and sticks to one stream of reality. Masterful.

The second issue I noticed in the construction of most of the novels is why Brockmann should still be classified as romance, rather than as military suspense or military action. While Brockmann has been, in my opinion, a large part of the surge of male interest in novels classified as romance, there's still a fundamental difference between Brockmann's novels and the few military suspense I've read written by men.

I noticed the difference in Flashpoint in particular, in a scene in which Jimmy Nash tells Tess about an incident he had. Or rather, tries not to tell her, tries to hide the worst of what happened to him. The scene is told from his perspective, and we see both what he tells Tess and what he tries to hide from her as he thinks about whether or not to hide it. What we DON'T see is the scene as it happens. We don't see him being betrayed by his contact, being chased, "taking out" the people chasing him. We only see the scene in retrospect as he tells Tess about it. Why? Because, for Brockmann, the interest in the scene lies not in the fact that it happened, but in how Nash himself and Tess react to it having happened. The interest in the "action" scene lies in how the two protagonists relate to each other because of what the "action" means (Nash's guilt, Tess's frustration). For Brockmann, the "action" scene is about relationships, about reaction, about emotion, not about the pure adrenalin of the scene itself. And THAT'S why her books are still romances. And I think that's an important thing to understand.