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Eleonora Ravizza (Leipzig): "'Who Could Not Be Happy With All This?':
The Fifties, Nostalgia, and Artificiality in Mad Men"
Abstract
In my presentation, I will situate a reading of the popular TV series Mad Men, and its portrayal of the Fifties, within the existing discourse on nostalgia in cultural studies. From Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon to Pam Cook and Christine Sprengler, many scholars have engaged with issues of nostalgia and representations of the Fifties in contemporary popular texts. Looking at how the Fifties have been depicted, I will analyze how, in the last two decades, texts have moved away from unquestioned nostalgic portrayals of that past, rather challenging the Fifties as a manufactured and idealized decade in American history. The show Mad Men, set in the world of advertising, reproduces the Fifties without recurring to a nostalgic attitude, but complicates its representation by emphasizing the process of creation of artificial images. In my presentation, I will focus on the close reading of selected scenes from the first season of Mad Men, paying particular attention how discourses of images, advertising, and consumerism participate in the representation of the past. Given the illusory nature of the represented images, particularly foregrounded by the thematic concerns of the series, Mad Men ultimately manages to expose the artificiality of the Fifties as a nostalgic construct.
Bio
After a BA in communication studies at the University of Bergamo (Italy), I have completed the MA program in American studies at the University of Leipzig in the summer of 2011. I am currently a PhD candidate in Leipzig, where I have been teaching American literature and culture to undergraduate students, as well as a seminar on masculinity in films. Still in the early stages of my PhD project, I am currently focusing on the cultural work that nostalgia performs and how it complicates representations of the Fifties/Sixties in recent films and TV series. My research interests include gender in popular culture, intertextuality, masculinity, and queer studies.