Presented in Collaboration with The GWU English Department:
Translated From the English:
British Reality on the Global Screen
Professor Jim English, John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania
Director of the Penn Humanities Forum
Wednesday March 5, 2014 – 2:30 – 4 pm – Marvin Center, Room 404
What is Britain’s role in the “world space” of cinema and television? When we speak of the globalization of art and entertainment media we tend to assume that the overarching story is one of Americanization: with each passing year the world’s screens become more pervasively dominated by American products and styles. In this presentation, Jim English will offer a different story, emphasizing the continuing power of Britain to shape the contours of global screen culture. Drawing on examples from the documentary film movement of the 1930s through the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire and recent television hits such as American Idol and X Factor, with their dozens of international variants, Professor English will argue that much of what succeeds best in today’s transnational markets depends on a specifically British-imperial system of “glocal” reality production. Jim English is author of Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Cornell UP) and The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard UP).
This event was made possible by a generous gift from English alum Sharyn Rosenblum (BA ’86)
