The doppelgänger—most often understood as an exact double of another living person—is a recurring trope of fantastical narratives in literary fiction and cinema. Encountering one’s double endures as the existential crisis par excellence by raising the question: if my doppelgänger is me, then who am I? Consequently, the doppelgänger has functioned as a means of exploring the psychology of characters that have been pushed to the edges of sanity and beyond by forces both internal and external. While the trope has a strong literary tradition, the photographic basis of cinema as a medium has enabled the visualization of perfect doppelgängers, which accounts in part for their proliferation in visual media. At its most basic, cinema has been understood as a reproduction (or double) of reality, offering us an imperfect duplication of the pro-filmic world. Film adaptations of literary works are also often conceived and assessed based on how faithfully they replicate an original source text. More salient in our present moment, digital technologies have allowed for seemingly perfect reproductions, indistinguishable from their originals, which unsettles distinctions between original and copy, like the doppelgänger.

This panel seeks participants looking to explore new facets and understandings of the doppelgänger, especially in relation to contemporary anxieties, subjectivities, psychologies, and case studies.

Please send abstract + bio + paper title (adhering to SCMS character limits) to Dru Jeffries (djeffries@wlu.ca) by August 2. Successful participations will be notified shortly thereafter.