![\"murray-left\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/melodramaresearchgroup\/files\/2013\/10\/murray-left.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nTalk Abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\n Just fifty years ago, melodrama was regarded, if at all, whether on stage, film, or tv, as a negligible, ephemeral, antiquated form of drama, a laughable thing, enjoyed by the poor, the illiterate, and the na\u00efve\u2014a thing, most importantly, perhaps, that modern realism had, or surely would soon, make obsolete and supersede.\u00a0 Today, it is starkly apparent that such dismissals were acts of monumental misperception.\u00a0 In theatre history, film and television studies, cultural history and narrative theory; in studies of the novel, the detective story, science fiction, and popular literature in general; of the vaudeville, the musical, silent film, and Hollywood cinema, and in the vast and diverse histories of popular literature, cinema, and television worldwide, we find melodrama everywhere<\/i>. \u00a0And melodrama is not only modernity\u2019s dominant narrative form: it has become a kind of meme that has penetrated and suffused the modern world.\u00a0 As a now substantial body of scholarship has made evident, its assumptions and conventions color our fictive drama in every medium and mode, tacitly inflect our political and social performance, implicitly structure our narrative construction of events in the press and in our lives, and appear even to inform our apprehension of external reality and our consciousness of self.<\/p>\n In this talk, I try to come to terms with this emergent history, first by looking to melodrama\u2019s origins and early development in an effort to discern more clearly what makes melodrama distinctive, and then by outlining the primary methods and processes that appear to characterize its development over time, its adaptation to new contexts and media, and its penetration and suffusion of discourse, imagination, and mind. \u00a0In closing, I explore the challenges this emergent view of melodrama\u2019s larger history presents to traditional research methods and perspectives, and suggest some of the ways in which those might be overcome.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Matt Buckley’s Bio:<\/strong><\/p>\n Matthew Buckley is an Associate Professor in\u00a0the Department\u00a0of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he teaches\u00a0courses on\u00a0comparative drama, media, and visual culture in modernity.\u00a0He is the author of Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution\u00a0in the Making of Modern Drama<\/i> (Johns Hopkins University\u00a0Press, 2006) and\u00a0has published articles on radical dramatic aesthetics, embodiment\u00a0in early\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 modern theatre, and the history and historiography of early\u00a0melodrama in Modern Drama<\/i>,\u00a0Theatre Survey<\/i>, Theatre\u00a0Journal<\/i>, Studies in\u00a0Romanticism<\/i>, and\u00a0Victorian Studies<\/i>.\u00a0 He is currently at work on\u00a0two books: Becoming Melodramatic<\/i>, a study of the formal and\u00a0cultural\u00a0development of early stage melodrama, and Place\u00a0of Seeing<\/i>, a series of essays on theatre iconography and visual performance\u00a0between 1580 and 1880.\u00a0 He\u00a0is the\u00a0founding director of the Melodrama Research Consortium, an\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 international interdisciplinary organization devoted to the comparative study of\u00a0stage, film,\u00a0television, and new media melodrama.\u00a0He is now developing a digital database project on the\u00a0emergence of\u00a0melodramatic theatre in Britain, France, Germany, and America.<\/p>\n More details will be posted to the blog in due course.<\/p>\n Do put the date in your diaries, and please note that our planned meeting on the 26th of March will no longer take place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Posted by Sarah The Melodrama Research Group is very pleased to welcome Matt Buckley, Rutgers University, to give a talk entitled ‘On Melodrama as a Modern Art’ on Tuesday the 25th of March, in GLT3, from 5-6 pm. Talk Abstract: … Continue reading