In order to contribute to the current critical status of the film Dead Poets Society (1989), this panel seeks to unpack and uncover features that have made it such a beloved, yet polarizing, text, both in its original moment of reception and now, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its release. The majority of mainstream movie critics have regarded Dead Poets Society as a charming and uplifting film that extols quintessentially American Romantic virtues of individualism, non-conformity, and “carpe diem,” the film’s recursive rallying cry. Often read as a coming-of-age tale of young men who are confined by the walls of an elitist preparatory school until being released by a charismatic teacher into the natural idyll outside those walls, Dead Poets Society has captivated audiences for twenty-five years while receiving consistently harsh treatment from both pedagogues and film scholars, skeptical of both its pedagogical messianism and its ideological conservatism.
This panel seeks to address rigorously the cultural and political implications of this filmic text that offers profound ethical and moral ambiguity regarding the nature of free will and the function of power. Papers on this panel will focus on four components of Dead Poets Society through multidisciplinary frameworks: first, a trauma studies interrogation by Brittany Hirth into the analgesic properties of poetry as they are extolled and exhibited in the film; second, a rhetorical analysis by Gavin Hurley of the ways in which characters in the film form identities of self and solidarity while being encouraged to take action; third, a thanatological inquiry by Sara Murphy into the film’s reflection and reification of a cultural conception of romanticized suicide; and fourth, a film studies reading by Don Rodrigues of the text’s presentation of both an ideologically vacant world and simultaneously and hysterically, a world threatened by thermonuclear holocaust and AIDS.
About the presentersSara E. Murphy
Sara Murphy is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Rhode Island and a certified thanatologist through the Association for Death Education and Counseling. Her multidisciplinary work engages contemporary and 19th century American literature, gender and sexuality studies, death education, and radical pedagogy. Her dissertation is an exploration of the American culture of suicide in the literature and culture of the 1990’s. Sara teaches specialized seminars in medicine, loss, grief, and culture for the Honors Program, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Program of Thanatology at URI.
Don Rodrigues
Don Rodrigues is a PhD student and instructor of English and a TA in the Cinema and Media Arts program at Vanderbilt University. His work focuses on media and game studies, theories of identity, sovereignty, and statehood, and both early modern and contemporary intellectual and literary history. He is a HASTAC Scholar alumnus and co-founder of Vanderbilt University’s Digital Humanities Working Group.