Saturday 22 November
The Cinema Museum, 2 Dugard Way
(off Renfrew Road)
London SE11 4TH
Why should we study romantic comedy, and how should we do it? Find out at this full-day event focusing on academic research on the romantic-comedy film genre.
Romantic comedy is one of Hollywood’s longest-running genres, with roots going back to the early 1930s, and contemporary releases seen by millions worldwide. Yet despite its popularity, in recent years in particular it has been widely criticised or even ridiculed as formulaic and excessively sentimental, in both academic and popular media discourse. The event will combine round-table discussions of the genre’s ‘bad reputation’ with screenings of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 masterpiece The Shop Around the Corner and Nora Ephron’s 1998 remake, You’ve Got Mail. Rom-com scholars including Professor Peter W. Evans (Queen Mary, University of London), Dr. Deborah Jermyn (Roehampton University), Dr. Mary Harrod (Univeristy of Warwick) and Dr. Martha Shearer (King’s College London) will discuss the reasons for and try to get beyond such prejudices, instead considering the ‘battle-of-the-sexes’ genre’s wider relevance to such socio-cultural issues as evolving gender roles and coupling norms over the last century. They will cover such questions as: How do we define romantic comedy? What is the contemporary relevance of studying romantic comedy? How has romantic-comedy scholarship evolved over the last decade, and what is its future? And finally, why does the romantic comedy continue to have such a poor reputation?
Tickets: £5 (adults), £3 (students, concessions)