Siobhan S. Craig
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
11 Lind Hall,
207 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612)625-6087
craig026@umn.edu
Siobhan Craig's work in European cinema centers on the political, aesthetic and theoretical re-visioning of film as medium in the aftermath of Fascism. She is interested in exploring the new cinematic languages that emerge from the rubble, both literal and symbolic, of the European cities after 1945. The specter of Fascism haunts European cinema after the war; filmmakers confront the legacies of fascist cinema in complex, ambivalent and highly coded ways. Previous structures of subjectivity, established boundaries of identity, sexuality, nationality and historiography, have collapsed with the Fascist regimes that sustained them. Professor Craig's ongoing book project explores the intersections between the rubble on the screen and the rubble of cinematic representation itself as postwar directors engage with the fascist past of their medium. Attempts to reconfigure the idioms of cinema, ranging from the Neorealism of Rossellini to Fassbinder's "neo-melodramas," remain highly precarious. These new cinematic languages are never fully naturalized: the joins, joists and scaffolding remain visible.
Department Affiliations
English; Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
Areas of Expertise
Fascist-era cinema in Italy and Germany; Italian Neorealism, especially the films of Roberto Rossellini; new German cinema; post-war cinematic interrogations of Fascism, gender, sexuality and representation, especially in the work of Bertollucci, Fassbinder, Resnais and Pasolini; literary and cultural theory after 1968, focusing on psychoanalysis, queer and feminist theories, post-modern theories of language and meaning, and film theory
Selected Publications
"'Tu n'as rien vu a Hiroshima' : Spectatorship, Desire and the Vaporized Subject in Hiroshima mon amour." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22.1 (2005).
"The Abyss of Language and the Trace of History in Ingeborg Bachmann's 'Simultan." The Women in German Yearbook v. 16 (2000).
"Monstrous Dialogues: Erotic Discourse and the Dialogic Constitution of the Subject in Frankenstein." A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin. Ed. Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Graduate Courses
Reading Cinema and Violence
The Shattered Spectator
Literary and Cultural Theory
Undergraduate Courses
Fascism and Film
Contemporary Literature and Culture: The Split and Sutured Self
Seductions: Film/Gender/Desire
Our Monsters, Ourselves
Modern Literary Criticism and Theory
The Western: Looking Awry
Introduction to Literature: Poetry, Drama, Narrative