October 3: D.N. Rodowick on Christian Metz and the Invention of Theory

Note: If you will be attending the reception immediately following the talk, please RSVP by Friday, September 27 to the official event Evite.

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Please save the date for the opening of the 2013-14 Chicago Film Seminar. We are pleased to announce that on Thursday, October 3rd at 6:30pm D.N. Rodowick, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Cinema and Media Studies and the College at University of Chicago, will give a talk entitled "After the Long Eclipse: Christian Metz and the Invention of Theory."  Domietta Torlasco, associate professor of Italian and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern, will deliver the response. 

We will convene at DePaul's Loop Campus in the Daley Building at 14 E. Jackson Blvd. (at State St.), Room LL 102.  **We ask that you use the State St. entrance to the building, located at 247 S. State.**  Maps can be found here and here.  A reception will follow.

Rodowick describes his talk as follows:

In this paper, I will argue that the early work of Christian Metz inaugurates a discourse of "theory." In a group of texts published between 1964 and 1972, Christian Metz inaugurates a theretofore unknown discourse of "theory." Metz is one of the first figures to make present and perspicuous a new concept of theory by constructing theory as an object, examining its history, and testing its present and potential claims to generate knowledge. In these seven short years, for film studies at least, Metz becomes "discursive" in Foucault's sense. Not just the author of film theories but the focal point of a new system of address, which emits from a new institutional context with its own rhetorical style and sense of place in history, setting out a new conceptual framework defined by precise principles of pertinence and implicit criteria of inclusion and exclusion for the practice of theory.

We look forward to seeing you there.