Pamela Weidman

Biography: 

I am a PhD candidate in English and Film & Media, and I currently work on experimental character in novels and animation around WWII. My dissertation looks at how major novels and popular animated films alike developed techniques of limited characterization as a way of reworking the pervasive imagery of World War II propaganda: I examine ideas of character, type, and stereotype in writings by Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, and in films from Disney, UPA, and avant-garde filmmakers. My research and teaching interests include modernist novels, animation, early cinema, early computer games, Woolf, Proust, and theories of character.

Selected Publications

Publications

“‘Floated invincibly’: Animating Character in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Studies in the Novel, vol. 55, no. 3, 2023, pp. 267–88.

"'A Great Blank': Reading Omission in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography and Sally Potter's Orlando (1994)." Virginia Woolf: Professions and Performance, edited by Benjamin D. Hagen and Taya Sazama, Pace UP (forthcoming).

Papers Delivered

"Minimalist Character and Modernist Type: Virginia Woolf's 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' and Ralph Ellison's 'The Little Man at Chehaw Station,'" Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, January 4–7, 2024.

"'You': Addressing the Player-Character in Twentieth Century Texts," Narrascope, University of Pittsburgh, June 9–11, 2023.

“‘A Great Blank’: Reading the Unwritable in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography,” Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, University of South Dakota, Sioux Falls (online), June 10–13, 2021.

“‘Her proper setting’: Arranging Objects and Affects in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, American Comparative Literature Association, Montréal (online), April 8–11, 2021.

“‘Imperfect gleam of moonshine': Beholding Gothic Objects in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Toronto (online), April 8–10, 2021.

“Dorothy Hale’s The Novel and the New Ethics.” New Novel Studies at Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley (online), March 5, 2021. Invited.