Anna Torres-Cacoullos

Her current book project, Writing for New Literacies: Film Culture and Moving-Image Storytelling in Silver Age Spain (1896-1930), argues that the new storytelling medium of silent film and its accompanying film culture served as a forceful impetus for the expansion of literary genres in the early 20^th century in Spain. As cinema’s moving images impelled modernist writers to rethink narrative expression, film fan culture rendered urgent the emergence of radically new types of cultural authority. The production of new genres of storytelling—metafictional prologues, film scripts and novel-films—spoke to an expanding body of cinema-literate readers, now including women and adolescents. Adapting to a new ‘film literacy,’ these experimental literary-cinematographic texts launched inquiries into notions of audience, narration, genre, and medium through their unusual styles, formats, and narrative techniques. In so doing, they challenged the nature of reading and writing, interrogated the multifaceted ways of telling a story, and elicited new demands of critical involvement from the reader—a now new reader-viewer. Ultimately, they advanced a new manner of intellectualized consumer reading, one that blurred the divide between high and lowbrow culture, or between the (literary) intellectual and the (filmic) consumer.

To learn more about her research and teaching, see "940 Feet with Anna Torres-Cacoullos." This video is part of the 940 Feet series, where College of LAS students and professors give a sneak peek of one of the UIUC's most beloved spots.