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GIG 255
Profile
Caroline Bem is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Communication. Her research focuses on the materiality, ethics, and aesthetics of media forms, which she examines through close engagement with films, video games, visual artworks, as well as narrative texts. She is also invested in theorizing the emergence of recent theoretical currents, such as intermediality and the New Formalism, and in contributing to the conversation on the place and future of the humanities within the contemporary academy. Her recent publications can be found in Screen (Oxford UP), JCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies/Michigan Publishing), Communications et langages (Presses Universitaires de France), and CiNéMAS (Université de Montréal/Érudit). In 2018, she edited a special issue of the international and bilingual peer-reviewed journal Intermédialités (Presses de l'Université de Montréal/Érudit) titled "Mapping (Intermediality' (vols 30-31, Fall 2017-Spring 2018). She is now a member of the editorial board of Intermédialités, and she is also a regular member of the Centre de Recherches Intermédiales sur les arts, les lettres et les techniques (CRIalt) at Université de Montréal.
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ISC 1708 - Initiation aux nouveaux médias
Initiation à l’étude de quelques techniques de la communication et à l’étude des médias. Introduction aux lois du langage de l’image, à la photographie, au montage audiovisuel (image et son), à l’informatique et aux nouvelles technologies de communication.
Ce cours était anciennement sous la cote ISC 2708.
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ISC 1308 - Introduction to New Media
Initiation to the techniques of communication and to the study of media. Trough basic exercises initiation to the laws of image from the perspective of the communication studies, to design and to photography. Audiovisual editing (image and sound), computer software and new technologies of communication.
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ISC 2731 - Conception de la société
Grandes traditions de compréhension de la société. Notamment : la tradition fonctionnaliste (Durkheim, Malinowski); la tradition des groupes en conflit (le marxisme, le féminisme); les traditions interactionnistes; les conceptions économiques du social.
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ISC 3331 - Knowing the Media
Evolution and future of great media. Commercial logic and business models. Understanding media issues in specific social contexts. National media reality and globalization.
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ISC 3718 - Analyse de contenu
Méthode de l’analyse de contenu. Étude critique du discours religieux dénommé et dénoté dans les émissions produites à la radio et à la télévision et dans la presse écrite. Traitement des sujets religieux et la couverture donnée aux événements religieux. Le «religieux» dans les autres productions.
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ISC 4702 - Communications sociales et médias sociaux
Notion de communication sociale. Évolution du Web et avènement des médias sociaux. Types de médias sociaux et principaux usages. Médias sociaux et pratiques actuelles de communication.
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ISC 4304 - Media and Religious Traditions
Historical clashes between the media and religious traditions. Culture, religious traditions and the media. Possible divergences and convergences. Religious traditions and new technologies.
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THO 4133 - Special Topics in Theology III
A course whose content can vary, and which is renewed periodically, dealing with a specific theological matter.
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ISC 2331 - Conceptions of Society
Great traditions in social thought. In particular: the functionalist tradition; the conflictual tradition; the interactionist tradition; the economical conceptions of social reality.
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ISC 2731 - Conception de la société
Grandes traditions de compréhension de la société. Notamment : la tradition fonctionnaliste (Durkheim, Malinowski); la tradition des groupes en conflit (le marxisme, le féminisme); les traditions interactionnistes; les conceptions économiques du social.
Ph.D., Communication Studies, McGill University, Canada, 2016
M.A., Communication Studies, McGill University, Canada, 2009
B.A. (Hons) Film Studies with Philosophy, Anglia Ruskin University, UK, 2006
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Book manuscript in progress: "The Diptych: A Moveable Form"
"The Diptych: A Moveable Form" builds upon the tension that exists between the conceptuality of forms and the materiality of media. Thus, it focuses on the affordances of the diptych form as much as it is about what, in reference to the “moveable feasts” of the Christian liturgical calendar, I call the diptych’s movability—the form’s ability to combine ever-shifting states of temporality and spatiality within a singular object. If, as I demonstrate in the first chapter of the book, material diptych objects are steeped in the paradoxical time of the event (which I theorize following Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou), where spatial states of openness and closure coexist, then "diptychal thinking" is the theoretical manifestation of an ability to think through political and ethical situations whose components are suspended in a continuity of polarization. Consequently, my book centers on the ethics of systems of thinking that represent or have emerged in response to binary structures of thought. Alongside a range of material and narrative objects, which range from paintings, vinyl records, reversible books, and double bill film posters to time-based and conceptual pieces such as Wicked Wicked (Richard L. Bare, 1973) and J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999), the book thus revisits writings that occupy a key role within the development of critical theory, from the foundational works of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Reinhart Koselleck, Homi K. Bhabha, and Judith Butler, to more recent writings by J. Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, and Eugenie Brinkema. By unwinding the thread of “diptychal thinking” that individually traverses these works and connects them to one another, I intend to show how an ethics rooted in paradox—defined as an extended process of “sitting with” unsolvable tension—holds the potential to allow for the productive rethinking of, and perhaps even for offering solutions to, the profound polarizations that are characteristic of the contemporary cultural and political moment.
Selection (please see CV for full list of publications):
Bem, Caroline. “Queering the Sense of an Ending in Greta Gerwig’s Adaptation of Little Women.” Proceedings of the 2022 Conference Impossible Fictions/Fictions impossibles. Eds. Alison James and Françoise Lavocat. Fabula – accepted.
Froger, Marion and Caroline Bem. “Case Studies as a Heuristic of Intermediality.” Handbook of Intermediality: Media Integration and Media Transformation in Theory and History. Eds. Jorgen Bruhn, Asun López-Varela Azcárate, Mary Simonson, and Miriam de Paiva Vieira (London: Palgrave-McMillian, 2023 – in press).
Bem, Caroline. “Humor in Pornographic Browser Games: From Undertale to Uddertale, a Case Study.” Games and Comedy. Eds. Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, Tomasz Z. Majkowski, and Jaroslav Švelch. (London: Palgrave-McMillian, 2022): 307-324.
Bem, Caroline. “‘Neither of us was much into feminist of queer porn.’ Petit traité audio-visuel de pornograhie queer en quatre scènes.” Eds. Julianne Pidduck and Joëlle Rouleau. CiNéMAS 29.3 “Le regard queer et l'image en mouvement” (Fall 2021): 33-56. doi.org/10.7202/1084570ar
Bem, Caroline and Marion Froger. “Construction collective d’une théorie en chantier. Les études de cas dans la revue Intermédialités.” Eds. Éric Méchoulan and Elsa Tadier. Communication & langages 208-209 “Études intermédiales: à la rencontre de l’École de Montréal” (2021): 247-267.
Bem, Caroline. “Cinema | Diptych: Grindhouse | Death Proof.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58.2 (Winter 2019): 1-22. doi.org/10.1353/cj.2019.0000
Bem, Caroline. “Mediality, Materiality, Narrative: Successive Incarnations of a Special Effect in Vanishing Point and Death Proof.” Screen 57.1 (Spring 2016): 52-70. doi:10.1093/screen/hjw001
Edited special issues in international peer-reviewed journals:
Sexualities. “Play !” (2021) Co-edited with Susanna Paasonen. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13634607211013662
Intermédialités. “Mapping (Intermediality)/Cartographier (l’intermédialité)” Vols. 30-31 (Fall 2017/Spring 2018). https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/im/2017-n30-31-im03868/
Book reviews in an international peer-reviewed journal:
Bem, Caroline. “Eugenie Brinkema, Life-Destroying Diagrams (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2021)” Screen 63.3 (Fall 2022): 389-393. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjac030
Bem, Caroline. “Alicia Spencer-Hall, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017)” Screen 60.4 (Winter 2019): 629-631. doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjz041
