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We seek essays of 4,000 to 8,000 words for an anthology that explores the work of writer-actor-director-comedian Terry Gilliam. For decades Gilliam has been a leading film auteur, both a comic and a social critic, and a historical, critical survey of his work is needed. While he has never wholly departed from his Monty Python roots, he has forged his own distinct vision. Gilliam cinematically creates worlds that are once familiar if unwelcome. He triumphs the mundane and the absurd. His anachronistic and off-kilter vision consistently throws off our ability to find a stable or common foundation on which to ground our approach to his films.
This collection of transnational, globalized Gilliam studies envisions understanding the intersection of our world and Gilliam’s in new cultural, historical, spatial, and epistemological frameworks: How does cultural production of a globalized world, where everything is at once local and international, fantasize a nostalgic return to a monomythic state of order and symmetry even as it dehistoricizes the globally industrialized military apparatus and competing ideologies of individuality versus groupthink? How do Gilliam’s (semi-) popular narratives construct “England” and “America” in the context of a globalized, dehumanizing, suffocating, and endless movement of goods and services across international boundaries? How do his films reconfigure spatial proximities of the United States, Great Britain and the rest of the world? How do popular culture and globalized business in their myriad forms mediate support for and/or dissent from the current global situation?
We welcome submissions that focus on surrealism, politics, aesthetics, absurdism, fantasy, or “Gilliamesque” influences on animation, etc. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• Monty Python and Film (e.g., The Life of Brian, The Holy Grail, etc.)
• Monty Python and Television (e.g., Flying Circus, Do Not Adjust Your Set.)
• Gilliam the Actor (e.g., The Life of Brian, Jabberwocky, Flying Circus)
• Gilliam the Director (e.g., Time Bandits, Baron von Munchausen, The Fisher King)
• Gilliam and the documentary (e.g. Lost in La Mancha)
• Gilliam's illustration/animation, from Mad Magazine to his television shows and filmography
• Commercial advertisements
• Auteur style
250-350 word abstracts, CV by April 30, 2008 to:
Jeff Birkenstein, Ph.D.
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Saint Martin’s University
5300 Pacific Avenue SE
Lacey, WA 98503 / USA
jbirkenstein@stmartin.edu
-or- Karen Randell, Ph.D.
Southampton Solent University
East Park Terrace
Southampton, Hampshire
S014 OYN / United Kingdom
Karen.randell@solent.ac.uk
-or- Anna Froula, Ph.D
English / Bate Building 2022
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858 / USA
Froulaa@ecu.edu
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