Revisiting The Bonfire of the Vanities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne De Boever
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Media

Following other critics of the so-called “finance fiction” or “fi-fi” genre, the chapter begins by observing that finance doesn’t play a major role in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities: It is limited to the pages about a gold-backed bond and the neoliberalization of black power, an issue that Wolfe had already addressed in his earlier “Radical Chic.” Instead, the chapter identifies “psychosis” as a major theme in this contemporary finance fiction. While many critics have focused on racism in the novel, and in some cases on what they perceive to be the racism of the novel (which, in its avowedly all-inclusive representation of New York City privileges the upper-class white perspective), its revisionist reading lays bare what I consider to be the novel’s central drama: how both its white, upper-class protagonist Sherman McCoy and its black, lower-class protagonist Henry Lamb are caught up in psychotic situations created by money, politics, and the media—situations over which they have no control. The chapter ultimately turns to Cristina Alger’s The Darlings as an example of how this is borne out in post-2008 financial fiction.

“I'll Show You the Bowery from Chatham Square to the Cooper Institute”: The Entertainment and Ethics of Slumming in the Theatre

2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-212
Author(s):  
J. Chris Westgate
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Box Office ◽  
East River ◽  
Brooklyn Bridge

In 1894, Robert Neilson Stephens's playOn the Bowerydebuted at Haverly's Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York City, with Steve Brodie, who had won fame for purportedly jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge years earlier, playing himself. Although Brodie's entrance is delayed until the second act, he rather quickly commandeers the plot and leads the rest of the characters through the Bowery and across the Brooklyn Bridge (where he reenacts his jump to enthusiastic audiences) to an East River pier, where he leaps into a burning building to rescue one of those perpetually distressed damsels from the 1890s. Naturally, mainstream newspapers were rather critical ofOn the Bowery’s literary merits. TheNew York Heraldclaimed that the play made “no dramatic pretensions,” and thePhiladelphia Inquireremphasized that it left the critic not “overly impressed with the play as a play.” TheNew York Timestook an especially harsh line. Lamenting the play's “threadbare plot” and “no originality,” and overreliance on Brodie's celebrity, its critic used the production as an opportunity to advance rigid delineations of highbrow and lowbrow, upper class and lower class, and literature and leisure. For what this reviewer described as the “Brodie audience,” the working-class spectators who crowded the gallery and boisterously cheered Brodie's every feat,On the Bowerygratified a yearning for escapism and entertainment.On the Bowerywas not, according to theTimes, geared to what the reviewer described as the “Booth audience,” the middle- and upper-class spectators who normally prized Edwin Booth's Shakespearean performances: “even the management does not take [Brodie] seriously.” If box office success is any measure, however, many from both the Booth and Brodie audiences did takeOn the Boweryseriously. Productions of the play toured for nearly three years, and a number of plays emulatedOn the Boweryduring the next five years. If Bruce McConachie is right that what is relevant is not “whether . . . melodramas were any good” but what audiences were watching and what meanings they were constructing from these plays, then theatre history should takeOn the Boweryseriously too.

New Retail Capital and Neighborhood Change: Boutiques and Gentrification in New York City

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Zukin ◽  
Valerie Trujillo ◽  
Peter Frase ◽  
Danielle Jackson ◽  
Tim Recuber ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Chain Stores ◽  
Corporate Capital ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
The Media

Since the 1970s, certain types of upscale restaurants, cafés, and stores have emerged as highly visible signs of gentrification in cities all over the world. Taking Harlem and Williamsburg as field sites, we explore the role of these new stores and services (“boutiques”) as agents of change in New York City through data on changing composition of retail and services, interviews with new store owners, and discursive analysis of print media. Since the 1990s, the share of boutiques, including those owned by small local chains, has dramatically increased, while the share of corporate capital (large chain stores) has increased somewhat, and the share of traditional local stores and services has greatly declined. the media, state, and quasi–public organizations all value boutiques, which they see as symbols and agents of revitalization. Meanwhile, new retail investors—many, in Harlem, from the new black middle class—are actively changing the social class and ethnic character of the neighborhoods. Despite owners’ responsiveness to community identity and racial solidarity, “boutiquing” calls attention to displacement of local retail stores and services on which long–term, lower class residents rely and to the state's failure to take responsibility for their retention, especially in a time of economic crisis.

A Hotel of Her Own: Building by and for the New Woman, 1900-1930

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-541
Author(s):  
Nikki Mandell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
A Site

This article examines the little-known phenomenon of apartment hotels built for single middle- and upper-class women during the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on New York City, where the first and most influential of these residences opened, this study argues that upscale women’s apartment hotels severed the Victorian equivalency between home and family, and reconfigured home as a site of women’s independence and self-fulfillment. They also helped redefine women’s economic role; rather than engaging elite women as consumers of household goods, apartment hotels engaged them as consumers of housing and as real-estate developers. As women’s apartment hotels moved from amusing experiment to markers of twentieth-century modernity, they etched the New Woman’s individuality, ambitions, sexuality, and civic engagement into the urban landscape.

Unilever's Mission for Vitality

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
David Austen-Smith ◽  
Adam Galinsky ◽  
Katherine H. Chung ◽  
Christy LaVanway
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Mission Statement ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Consumer Awareness ◽  
Portfolio Company ◽  
The Media ◽  
A Company ◽  
Conflicting Messages

Dove and Axe were two highly successful brands owned by Unilever, a portfolio company. Dove was a female-oriented beauty product brand that exhorted “real beauty” and not the unachievable standards that the media portrayed. In contrast, Axe was a brand that purportedly “gives men the edge in the mating game.”□ Their risqué commercials always portrayed the supermodel-type beauty ideal that Dove was trying to change. Unilever had always been a company of brands where the consumer knew the brands but not the company, but recently there had been the idea to unify the company with an umbrella mission for all of its brands. This would turn Unilever into a company with brands, potentially increasing consumer awareness and encourage cross-purchases between the different brands. However, this raised questions about the conflicting messages between the brands' marketing campaigns, most notably between Unilever's two powerhouse brands, Dove and Axe. The case begins with COO Alan Jope anticipating an upcoming press meeting in New York City to discuss Unilever's current (i.e., 2005) performance and announce Unilever's decision to create an umbrella mission statement for the company. This case focuses on the central question of whether or not consistency between brand messages is necessary or inherently problematic.The Unilever's Mission for Vitality case was created to help students and managers develop an appreciation for how the values underlying a marketing campaign can affect and alter an organization's culture. The case focuses on how two products and marketing campaigns that express conflicting underlying values (as reflected in the Dove Real Beauty and the Axe Effect campaigns) within the same corporation can give rise to a number of unintended organizational and marketing complications.

Phobias and Nervous Symptoms in Childhood and Maturity: Persistence and Associations

1972 ◽  
Vol 120 (556) ◽  
pp. 275-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Abe
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Life Time ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Falling Asleep ◽  
High Prevalence ◽  
Age Range ◽  
Apparently Healthy

Most people suffer from so-called ‘nervous symptoms' sometime during life, and their activity is influenced in varying degrees by these symptoms. There are a number of works reporting high prevalence of so-called neurotic symptoms: Rennie and his collaborators studied a sample of the population in the age range 20–59 of the central residential area of New York City and found that 75 per cent manifested significant symptoms of anxiety and that only 11 per cent of the lower class and 29 per cent of the upper class were psychiatrically symptom-free respondents (Rennie, Srole, Opler and Langner, 1957). Leighton found the life-time prevalence (after the age of 18) of psychoneurotic symptoms in a small town (population about 3,000) to be 67 per cent (Leighton, 1956). Winter interviewed 200 apparently healthy workers (mean age 36·6 years, 141 males and 59 females) of various social strata of Berlin, and found only 18 per cent free from so-called neurotic symptoms, i.e. anxiety, phobia, insomnia, headache and other psychosomatic symptoms (Winter, 1959). Agras, Sylvester and Oliveau found the prevalence of fear of storms, enclosures and journeying alone in females of Burlington to be 31 per cent, 14 per cent and 10 per cent respectively, and noted that psychiatrists saw only a small percentage of the phobic population (Agras, Sylvester and Oliveau, 1969). In all of these surveys, the authors noted that the majority of those with symptoms appeared to function well in the society. In Japan, a comparable survey is lacking, but Kasahara and Sakamoto investigated by questionnaire 2,481 students who entered Kyoto University in 1967 and found 24·1 per cent suffering from headache and 18 · 5 per cent from difficulty in falling asleep (Kasahara and Sakamoto, 1970). On 30 August 1970, N.H.K. (Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) invited to the studio 100 males who had graduated in 1945 from a single metropolitan all-male middle school for a programme entided ‘Age Forty’, in which health, economical and social status of this age group was enquired into. Among these, 26 ‘often suffered from palpitation and shortness of breath without significant exertion’, and 34 often awoke in the middle of the night or too early in the morning and could not get back to sleep again.

scholarly journals Theatrical Illness: Tuberculosis and HIV as Presented by "La Boheme" and "Rent"

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-45
Author(s):  
Jessica Downing
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Specific Time ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
La Boheme

Note: In lieu of an abstract, this is the article's first paragraph. "The musical Rent made its Broadway debut on January 25, 1996, a century after the opening performance of the opera, La Boheme. This correlation was a coincidence, though Rent draws significantly on the story of La Boheme, to the extent that a New York Times reviewer deemed it a "contemporary answer to Puccini's 'Boheme."' Each of these productions presents the troubles and tragedies of the bohemian lifestyle in a specific time and place-La Boheme in Paris during the 1830s and Rent in New York City during 1989. Disease, too, is a major theme in each: tuberculosis in La Boheme, and HIV in Rent. Each of the plays illustrate the different effects of the diseases with respect to conceptions of life and death, identity, spiritual promotion, and time. The historical and medical contexts of tuberculosis and HIV manifest in different perceptions of diagnosis and contagion. The extent of influence La Boheme had on Rent calls for a comparison of the representations of these two diseases in their respective historical contexts."

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