The Cross-Country/Cross-Class Drives of Don Draper/Dick Whitman: Examining Mad Men’s Hobo Narrative

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-75
Author(s):  
Jennifer Forsberg
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
First Century ◽  
Television Show ◽  
White Masculinity ◽  
Madison Avenue ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Mad Men ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Material Conditions

This article examines how the critically acclaimed television show Mad Men (2007-2015) sells romanticized working-class representations to middle-class audiences, including contemporary cable subscribers. The television drama’s lead protagonist, Don Draper, exhibits class performatively in his assumed identity as a Madison Avenue ad executive, which is in constant conflict with his hobo-driven born identity of Dick Whitman. To fully examine Draper/Whitman’s cross-class tensions, I draw on the American literary form of the hobo narrative, which issues agency to the hobo figure but overlooks the material conditions of homelessness. I argue that the hobo narrative becomes a predominant but overlooked aspect of Mad Men’s period presentation, specifically one that is used as a technique for self-making and self-marketing white masculinity in twenty-first century U.S. cultural productions.

Urban Images of Roman Authors

1965 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Fleiss Lowenstein
Keyword(s):  
Literary Form ◽  
First Century ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
City Life ◽  
Urban Images ◽  
Urban Scene

In this age of rapid urbanization, with all that that term connotes, it is revealing to view the familiar and ofttimes troublesome attributes of city life from the perspectives of the sophisticated urbanites of an earlier era. Our aim, then, has been to glean from the writings of the ancient Romans their personal images of, impressions of, and attitudes toward life in a metropolitan environment. The period covered extends from the time of Cato through the end of the First Century A.D. If the satirists seem overly represented in this distribution of authors, the explanation is simply that the satirists chose to comment upon the conditions of city life more frequently and more intensely than did other writers. Horace even suggests that satire is the literary form most appropriate for commentary upon the urban scene (Satire II. 6).

Koranlektüre-Kurse für „Intellektuelle“ in Dakar, Senegal: religiöse Erwachsenenbildung in frankophonen Mittelschichtsmilieus

Sociologus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-179
Author(s):  
Nadine Sieveking
Keyword(s):  
Adult Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Time Management ◽  
Specific Method ◽  
Effective Time ◽  
Secular Education ◽  
Social Positioning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Arabic Speaking

Seit 2015 werden in Dakar Koranlektürekurse von einer Organisation angeboten, die verspricht, mittels einfacher und effizienter Methoden die Fähigkeiten zum eigenständigen Lesen des Korans innerhalb von drei Monaten zu vermitteln. Diese kostenpflichtigen Kurse sind auf eine spezielle Zielgruppe in frankophonen urbanen Bildungsmilieus zugeschnitten, die als „Intellektuelle“ bezeichnet wird. Der Artikel untersucht den Erfolg der Kurse und die soziale Positionierung der Beteiligten, die sich aus arabophonen (Lehrende) und frankophonen (Lernende) Bildungsgruppen rekrutieren. Letzteren wurde nach der Unabhängigkeit ein exklusiver Status als nationale Bildungselite zugeschrieben, der durch anhaltende Islamisierungsprozesse ‚von unten‘ zunehmend in Frage gestellt wird. Die Analyse zeigt, dass die Kurse dazu beitragen, die symbolischen Grenzen zwischen francisants und arabisants abzubauen und den frankophonen Teilnehmenden helfen, einen sozialen Status aufrecht zu erhalten, der respektable Modernität verkörpert. Eine wichtige Rolle für den Erfolg der Kurse spielen außerdem das effektive Zeitmanagement, die pädagogischen Methoden sowie die bürokratischen, räumlichen und materiellen Organisationsstrukturen, die dem Habitus der in säkularen, modernen Bildungssystemen sozialisierten Zielgruppe entsprechen. Qur’an Reading Courses for “Intellectuals” in Dakar, Senegal: Religious Adult Education in Francophone Middle Class Milieus Since 2015, a certain type of Quran reading course has been offered in Dakar. With their simple but efficient methods, these courses promise attendees the ability to read the Quran within three months. They are subject to fees and target a specific social group, identified as “intellectuals” and located within francophone educated urban milieus. The article examines the success of these courses and the social positioning of its participants, who are drawn from Arabic-speaking (teachers) and francophone (students) educated groups. Since Senegal’s independence, the latter have been ascribed an exclusive status as the national educated elite – a status that is increasingly questioned in ongoing Islamization processes ‘from below’. The analysis shows that the courses contribute to a weakening of the symbolic boundaries between francisants and arabisants and help the participants to reinforce a social status that embodies notions of respectable modernity. The specific method and pedagogy of the courses also play an important role in their success, as do their effective time management, their bureaucratic structures, and their spatial and material conditions, since these all correspond to the habitus of the target group whose members have been socialized within modern secular education systems.

scholarly journals Body Surrogates: Mannequins, Life-Size Dolls, and Avatars

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Francesco Spampinato
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
First Century ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Material Conditions

One of the tropes of these early years of the twenty-first century is that of the avatar, a virtual representation of a human being used for entertainment, educational, technical, or scientific purposes. The avatar is a product of digital culture, but its origins are coeval with those of the human being and its evolution is affected by material conditions and the level of technology currently achieved by a given society. The origin of the word “avatar” has a spiritual connotation: It was associated with Hinduism and used to describe a deity who took a terrestrial form. More generally, however, whether in terms of religion or computing, we could define the avatar as a surrogate, a body—real or virtual—that replaces another.

Japan in the 1950s: Symbolic Victims

Alegal ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 15-37
Author(s):  
Annmaria M. Shimabuku
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The State ◽  
Sexual Slavery ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
The Family ◽  
Sexual Labor

Chapter 1 presents a genealogy of sexual labor in Japan from licensed prostitution and the so-called “comfort woman” system of sexual slavery in the imperial period, through the state-organized system of prostitution for the Allied forces in the immediate postwar, and to the full-fledged emergence of independent streetwalkers thereafter. It links protest against private prostitution in the interwar period to aversion toward the streetwalker in the postwar period through an examination of Tosaka Jun’s Japanese Ideology. There, he defined Japanism as the symbolic communion between the family and state and showed how Japanists attacked private prostitution for purportedly interfering with the integrity of both. What was at stake was the ability of a budding middle class to manage the reproduction of labor power for the biopolitical state. Through Tosaka, this chapter delineates a mechanism of social defence amongst the middle class that targeted life thought to be unintelligible to the state such as the streetwalker and her mixed-race offspring. Further, it shows how this occurred through cultural productions such as anti-base reportage that focused obsessively on the figure of the streetwalker.

Beyond tropes: a dialogue on Asian women's experiences in the outdoors.

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-77
Author(s):  
Yi Chien Jade Ho ◽  
Pei Ting Tham
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Outdoor Education ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Gender Oppression ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Systemic Discrimination

Abstract In this chapter, researchers offer their own experiences through an extended dialogue between a long-term outdoor educator in Australia and a researcher of outdoor education in Canada. They engage and share their conversations in order to highlight the ways in which outdoor education as an industry and academic field perpetuates systems of racial and gender oppression. Although the chapter centres on racial and gender discrimination embedded in outdoor education policy and practices, the conversation also presents the ways in which class further entrenches systemic discrimination. Each axis of oppression works intersectionally to create unequal material conditions, further marginalizing people and communities who are not white, middle-class and/or male (Crenshaw, 1989; hooks, 2015; Taylor, 2017).

INTERNATIONALISING THE SONNET: TORU DUTT'S “SONNET – BAUGMAREE”

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 595-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Boundaries

“When the history of theliterature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of song” (Dutt xxvii). This sentence is Edmund Gosse's famous final flourish to his memoir of Toru Dutt, which introduced her posthumous volumeAncient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, published in 1882, five years after her death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-one. But what would Dutt's page look like in the history of “our country,” by which Gosse means of course England? This question is a tricky one, because placing a late nineteenth-century Bengali who was a Europhile, a Christian convert, and an English-language woman poet within a British Victorian tradition is a simplistic, if not a problematic appropriation of a colonial subject into the centre of the British Empire. Where Dutt belongs has long preoccupied critics who try to recuperate her poetry for an Indian national poetic tradition, or for a transnational, cosmopolitan poetics. The issue of placing Dutt allows us also to press questions about the conception of Victorian poetry studies, its geographical, cultural, and national boundaries, not just in the nineteenth-century creation of a canon but in our current conception of the symbolic map of Victorian poetry. But, while recent critics have celebrated her poetry's embrace of global poetry as a challenge to the parochialism of national literary boundaries, Dutt's original English-language poetry also suggests an uneven, uncomfortable hybridity, and a wry, ironic interplay between distance and proximity that unfolds through her use of poetic form. This essay investigates what it means to “make something” of Toru Dutt, in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-first century, what is at stake for Victorian poetry studies in privileging Dutt and her multi-lingual writing, and whether her celebrated transnationalism might not also include a discomfort with hybridity that reveals itself through the relation between space and literary form in her poetry.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Species Interaction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Reference Guide ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
Material Conditions

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical, contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare’s comic enterprises. It engages with perennial but still urgent questions raised by the comedies, looking at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Some essays take up firmly established topics of inquiry—Shakespeare’s source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, religion—and reformulate them in the kinds of materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects—ecology, cross-species interaction, humoral theory—that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation. Still others, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare’s period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. And others investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. Since the Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of scholarship on the comedies, it both provides a valuable reference guide and represents some of the most up-to-date work in the field.

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