Join us for the first Weird TV lecture in 2025!
Jeanne Prevost (University of Warsaw/independent researcher)
“‘It’s a true story – it happened to a Friend of a Friend (online)’: Urban Legends and Television in the Contemporary Era”.
Thursday, January 9, 2025
4:45 pm
*3 OZN*
Where?
Dobra 55, room: 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
Televisable narratives frequently inspire and are inspired by one another. Structures repeatable and scaffoldings borrowed. The interchangeability of narrativization takes place not only between projects within the same audio-visual medium, but in some instances oral traditions are reconstructed to form televisual narratives. The Urban Legend, a relatively nascent typological oral tradition, is one source which has inspired televisual narratives. Since the popularisation of television in North American homes, Urban Legends have found themselves repetitively ritualised – from the ‘call is coming from inside the house’ to ‘sewer alligators’.
Whether centering talk programming, news television, or fictionalised accounts, urban legends nest themselves in the minds of viewers, propagating, and ultimately regressively metamorphosing & returning to oral tradition, shared from viewer to non-viewer to non-viewer, so on and so forth. The oral links which are core to the Urban Legend are recreated anew. While found near universally across televisual programming, our interest rests in the anthology format television has adopted.
The stories told are familiar, but not entirely static. The narrative transaction shifts and subsumes itself to the socio-cultural changes. Each technological revolution in communication ripples and renders the narrativization of urban legends transposed onto television. It is in this vein that we will discuss the conceptualisation of the Urban Legend, the televisual forms it has taken, and its existence within the internet era.
Be sure to tell a friend what you hear, and maybe they too will tell a friend.
Who?
Jeanne Prevost is a MA graduate of the University of Warsaw’s Linguistic faculty where her research blended critical theory and legal discourse. Additionally, she holds a baccalaureate in Women’s Studies from Concordia University wherein she focused on reproductive rights, de/anti-colonialism, and foucauldian analysis. Over her academic path, she has cultivated an autodidact interest in the horror genre, exploring it through the lenses of queer theory and cultural positioning, particularly within slasher films. Jeanne’s current projects include an exploration of cinéma vérité in the horror genre and applying quantitative methodologies to the violent audiovisual violence enacted onto women in slasher films.
