Proposal Review Questionnaire

Thank you for agreeing to offer your opinion of this proposal. The questions on this form are simply intended as
a guide, so please feel free to include any additional comments you think might be useful. Your review will
remain anonymous, unless you instruct us otherwise.

1. What courses are you currently involved in teaching? Please list course title, level and number
of students.
Relevant courses a third year BA module on Hitchcock, an MA module on childrens film and a
number of PhDs focused on the visual. This is in the literature department of a UK university.
2. What is your initial impression of the proposal?
Please see comments below for additional answers to all of these questions.
The proposal looks really good.
3. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed book?
S: Very well written, original, filling a gap in the market. Good grasp of a wide range of theory.
Not from a single theoretical perspective. Makes productive links to gender, queer and fat
theory. Exciting.
W: Does not tease out tensions between theoretical positions as much as I would like. Careful
attention to the implications of ALL formulations of desire and appetite would help, even when
they might not seem to be part of the theoretical frame of the book.
4. Does the proposed book cover the topic adequately? Is there anything missing or anything
surplus to requirements? If yes, please provide details.
Yes, topic well covered.
I would like to see some clearer acknowledgment of criticism of embodiment, even if this is
ultimately questioned. This is not necessary, perhaps, but would make this an even more significant
monograph.
5. Is the proposed structure and organization appropriate? If you can suggest any improvements,
please do so below.
Yes, this has been very well planned and will work as a book. See below. I am not quite
convinced by the placing of the first chapter, however. I would also like to see the various
chapters speaking to each other in the final version but this will probably be the case
anyway.
6. Do you know of the author and his or her work? Do you feel the author is suitable to write on
this topic for this audience?

I dont know the author, I do know their work (my interest is in constructions of childhood and I
have also published on both queer theory and visual culture). The author is suitable.
7. Do you know of any other books on the same or similar topic? How do they compare to this
proposal?
Not on the same topic. There are a good number of texts on film and embodiment and on
Hitchcock and embodiment. This one is likely to be the best of these.
8. What would be the primary audience for the book? Please be specific in your answer if faculty,
which disciplines and, if students, which courses.
1) Film Studies. BA and MA.
2) Queer Studies and Gender Studies. BA and MA.
3) Academics with a research interest in Hitchcock.
This could be in literature, film, media, or gender studies departments. I think this book
would have a large audience.
9. Although the project is at a very early stage, based on this proposal, do you envisage:
a. Making the book required reading for your students?

b. Adding the book to a reading list for your students?

c. Recommending the book as a library purchase?

d. None of the above

Feel free to select more than one. Please explain your answer below.
Although not perhaps as theoretically advanced as Edelman on Hitchcock, this is a sophisticated
proposal, and the most interesting account of embodiment and Hitchcock I am aware of. I would
be arguing against this book but it would give me something significant and enriching to argue
against.
10. Based on this proposal, how would you frankly describe the book to a friend or colleague?
This is difficult as the book opposes my own reading of Hitchcock. This statement needs to be read
in that context. I would say something like:
The latest and best attempt to engage with Hitchcock and embodiment theory. Doesnt quite grasp
the criticism that can be mounted against this from a psychoanalytic point of view, but few do.
Read this one before the others.
11. Do you recommend we pursue publication? Please explain your answer.
Yes. This is an original and well written study. It will have an appeal to film, queer, gender and fat
studies students. It is part of a wider movement of embodiment theory that is immensely popular.
It is the best of its kind. It will become the standard text on the subject it treats.
12. Do you have any additional comments on the proposal?
See below.
13. Please let us know if you would prefer to remain anonymous or if you are happy for us to reveal
your identity to the author.

I would prefer to be anonymous but if the author really wants to know, I have no problem with
that.

Many thanks again for taking the time to answer these questions; your comments are going to be extremely
helpful.
We are always interested in hearing feedback from the academic community, so please dont hesitate to get in
touch if you have any comments on our publishing or if you would be interested in discussing any of your own
writing plans.

General comments
This is an excellent proposal, and I would be delighted to see this book completed and
published. I predict a commercial as well as an intellectual success. It makes fresh
connections across disciplines, is very well written, wide ranging, engages an area that I
think will be extremely popular with both students and researchers, and offers one of the
most sophisticated readings of its type I have encountered.
I think at this early stage it is worth noting that the proposal also argues from a position
that is pretty much the complete opposite of my own. I think the quality of the proposal
can therefore be gauged from my very positive reaction to it. I also think that my own
position (generally against embodiment and affect in Film Theory) should be taken into
consideration when reading through the following recommendations. I am not a neutral
commentator, and some of my suggestions might simply reflect my own prejudices, rather
than indicate any deficiencies with this proposal.
Suggestions:
1) Whilst beautifully and clearly written, I am slightly concerned by the certainty and generality of some of
the appeals to intentionality. For example: Hitchcocks famous dislike for eggs and pregnant
women, long a part of the public circulation of Hitchcockian lore, are not simple
accounts of endearing idiosyncrasy, but attempted correctives to the cultural
paradigms that link the fat male body to effeminacy, maternity, and emotional
susceptibility. It is an interesting argument, but the notion of revealed truth here
seems to be problematic. Within the chapter and introduction offered here, Hitchcockss
desires/appetites are sometimes apparently revealed through screen performance, a private note, a
directed sequence of film, sometimes with little or no engagement with the differences between these
various forms, and the different difficulties of ascertaining the truth of private experience from each. I
think, as it stands, issues of reading intent from different contexts is going to slowly be introduced over
the course of the book (the chapter on food is clearly going to establish how far filmic themes can be
thought to represent the body and thought of the director, as the chapter on cameo is going to explore the
complexity of reading on-screen performance), but a clear, early problematisation is required, however it
is eventually resolved. I dont think this kind of initial, broad appeal to intention helps, in other words.
Compare this to one of the many successful formulations that I think do not fall into such difficulties:
The Hitchcockian cinematic aesthetic relies on troping hungerculinary, libidinal, narrativeto

produce and satisfy hunger in his audiences. He famously quipped, For me, the cinema is not a slice of
life, but a piece of cake. Not cross-section, but confection; not microcosm, but meal; his cinematic
offering was the gift of visual and visceral pleasure. These very pleasures he himself enjoyed, however,
carried disillusioning consequences, and his body became an expression of both pleasure and its regret.
This is great stuff! The quip, the general aesthetic, the body, the film are all differentiated here, even as
they are linked. I would like to see this kind of formulation used more consistently in the introduction and
first chapter, in other words.

2) A related point: the notion that the following chapters argue that his fatness
informed and inflected his cinematic strategies of representation, his
understanding of gender and its embodiment, and his conception of the
corporeal more generally, here it seems that there is a fatness prior to
representation, a kind of real, non-aesthetic cause. My impression is that the
proposal is in fact arguing for something far more complex than this; that
fatness is meaningful, and cannot be separated easily from Hitchcocks wider
aesthetics. The difficulty here is how to introduce the notion of body and
fatness without enacting the separation that the work will subsequently
question. A little more clarity here would help.

3) One of the great advantages of this proposal is its non-doctrinal approach,

yet this is also potentially a flaw. It seems to me that there is a potential
tension between Lacanian and phenomenological approaches. I think this
could be briefly addressed early on, and kept in mind throughout. Edelman,
of course, offers the great defense of the disruptive power of the material
within a psychoanalytic reading (see pp. 24 5, p. 65 of No Future, for
example). Could this be introduced at an earlier stage? In other words, the
range of critical approaches is refreshing, but make sure tensions are clearly
highlighted when they arise, and that any potential tensions are signposted
early on.
4) This is working within a theory of embodiment that, for me, is increasingly
unchallenged within Film theory. The danger is that one can forget why
embodiment emerged as a theory, what it emerged against. It might be an
idea to look at one of the few recent questioning accounts, say, Daniela
Casellis Kindergarten theory: childhood, affect, critical thought, Feminist
Theory (2010) http://fty.sagepub.com/content/11/3/241.abstract. This has the
advantage of not only looking at Film Theory, but also childhood. Jacqueline
Roses classic The Imaginary would be the most obvious choice, perhaps.
The idea is, of course, not to side with these skeptical arguments, but to
acknowledge there is a debate, and to explain why Lacanian inflected
embodiment is understood to be the way to go. On the other side, I was
surprised not to see Paul Elliots Hitchcock and The Cinema Sensations
(2011) on the list of competing texts. For me, this proposal seems already far

superior to this particular work, but it is, I would suggest, a key text in the
field none-the-less.
Chapter 1
This is the only Chapter I have concerns with. It is well written and argued, and clearly the
issues discussed here are important to the whole work. As an initial chapter, however,
there is a danger of the book as a whole being understood to be framed within a somewhat
simple autobiographical approach. I realize that the status of autobiography is precisely
what is at stake in the following chapters, but there, through readings of childhood, selfrepresentation, food etc, it seems to me that the question of representation will be
constantly problematized: great. In other words, whereas the following chapters are
explicitly and consistently reading autobiography and the corporeal through film in a way
that argues for the complexity of their relationship, the first chapter is less concerned with
film, and (it might be thought) more the pre-representational. I think I can see some
advantages in the current form: it sets up the Selznick/Hollywood period as a kind of origin
in a number of senses; it is kind to readers by introducing the least complex ideas the book
will grapple with first. Most importantly, perhaps, it speaks to that which is claimed to be
repressed with Hitchcock scholarship: Yet, while Hitchcock the artist has been most often
painted in abstract terms, Hitchcock the celebrity relied on his physicality to create a
distinctive, unforgettable public reputation. I think, perhaps, this binary between celebrity
and artist needs to be set up in really clear terms at a very early stage. The potential issue
here is simply that readers will not have a clear sense of the complexity of reading to
come. I would like to see either more focus on the films here, or a far clearer sense of how
the ideas put forward at this early stage are challenged/drawn out in later chapters.
Chapter 2
This looks great. I would really like to read this, and would certainly include this on my
undergraduate reading list for my Hitchcock module.
Chapter 3
Again, another fascinating and potentially important chapter. Might this work as the first
chapter?
Chapter 4
This is a huge subject one could imagine an entire monograph devoted to this. Clearly
this needs to go in, but what limits will be placed on the analysis. How will it be framed?
Chapter 5 and 6
It strikes me there is a great potential for all of these chapters to speak to each other.
Rope has a lot to say about childhood, for example, as well as its more established
discourse on queer and food.