Dan Burns, assistant professor of English, recently presented at the American Comparative Literature Association鈥檚 annual meeting, held this year at the Palais des congr猫s de Montreal from March 14-17.
Dan Burns, assistant professor of English, recently presented at the American Comparative Literature Association鈥檚 annual meeting, held this year at the Palais des congr猫s de Montreal from March 14-17.
Burns, who is co-coordinator of the Global Film & Cultures minor, was a panelist at this year鈥檚 American Comparative Literature Association conference鈥攖he principal learned society in the United States for cross-cultural literary study and scholars that teach and write across nations, languages, and cultures.
The three-day seminar, titled聽Writerly Worlds and Worldly Writers: Transcultural Receptions of German Literature, explored how various nations, cultures, translations, and technologies shape the reception aesthetics (Rezeptions盲sthetik) of German-language texts and writers.
Burns鈥 paper examined American writer-director Orson Welles鈥 1962 film Le Proc猫s (1962), an adaptation of the celebrated 1925 novel The Trial (Der Proze脽) by the Czech-German author Franz Kafka. A French, Italian, and West German co-production, Welles鈥 adaptation was met with a notoriously negative reception in its original release but has enjoyed a critical reevaluation in recent years. Following the recent turn in Kafka scholarship to a focus on European visual culture and experimental psychology in the author鈥檚 work, Burns analyzed Welles鈥 cinematic approach to the competing cognitive demands of attention and distraction in Kafka鈥檚 novel through innovations in mobile framing, continuity editing, and deep focus compositions.
The American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) promotes the study of intercultural relations that cross national boundaries, multicultural relations within a particular society, and the interactions between literature and other forms of human activity, including the arts, the sciences, philosophy, and cultural artifacts of all kinds.