RESEARCH SEMINAR

Dr Anja Louis (University of Sheffield)

‘Women, Melodrama and the Law: Carmen de Burgos’s work as a case study’

This paper explores the relationship between melodrama and law. My aim is to demonstrate that popular culture, in general, can have a positive function in the renegotiation of identities and how Burgos’s work, in particular, reworks melodramatic conventions in order to foreground and question accepted identity formations. I will use the fiction of Carmen de Burgos as a paradigmatic case to draw conclusions about the relationship between melodrama as a genre of Manichean worldviews and law as a system of binary oppositions and analyse Burgos’s subversion of the former as a means to criticise the latter. It is my aim to show how two disciplines with quite disparate aims share important matter of common concern, and how transgressing the boundaries that separate them enriches our understanding of both.

Friday, 6th of October, 2006 - 4 p.m. - ORB 1.85

Followed by a reception in ORB 1.51 - All Welcome!