Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"A Kindler, Gentler Time": How Pleasantville And The Truman Show "Fix" The 1950s Suburban Ideal, Sophie Cohen

English Honors Theses

The Truman Show and Pleasantville both present a vision of the 1950s that is manufactured and mediated by television. I attempt to explain this using Lauren Berlant's model of the pilgrimage narrative, in which a character encounters true America in Washington, DC. Instead of locating America in the nation’s capital, though, I argue that these films locate America in the idealized suburbs of the 1950s. I propose that this pilgrimage differs from the one Berlant outlines in one crucial way: the capital can be visited at any time, but if America is really located in 1950s suburbia, then citizens of …

No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings On The Jetsons, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

From Back to the Future to The Wonder Years, from Peggy Sue Got Married to The Stray Cats’ records – 1980s youth culture abounds with what Michael D. Dwyer has called “pop nostalgia,” a set of critical affective responses to representations of previous eras used to remake the present or to imagine corrective alternatives to it. Longings for the Fifties, Dwyer observes, were especially key to America’s self-fashioning during the Reagan era (2015).

Moving from these premises, I turn to anachronisms, aesthetic resonances, and intertextual references that point to, as Mark Fisher would have it, both a lost past …

To Be Everything: Sylvia Plath And The Problem That Has No Name, Alanna P. Mcauliffe

Student Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores, in depth, how the poetry of Sylvia Plath operates as an expression of female discontent in the decade directly preceding the sexual revolution. This analysis incorporates both sociohistorical context and theory introduced in Betty Friedan’s 1963 work The Feminine Mystique. In particular, Plath’s work is put in conversation with Friedan’s notion of the “problem that has no name,” an all-consuming sense of malaise and dissatisfaction that plagued American women in the postwar era. This notion is furthered by close-readings of poems written throughout various stages of Plath’s career (namely “Spinster,” “Two Sisters of Persephone,” “Elm,” “Ariel,” “Daddy,” …

The Need For Neal: The Importance Of Neal Cassady In The Work Of Jack Kerouac, Sydney Anders Ingram

MSU Graduate Theses

Neal Cassady has not been given enough credit for his role in the Beat Generation. This paper discusses Cassady's importance on the life and work of Jack Kerouac, especially focusing on his most famous novel, On the Road. Cassady lent himself as the hero of On the Road and supplied Kerouac with the spontaneous prose style that made him famous. This look at Cassady puts him into the context of the time period in which he lived and in which On the Road was written. Cassady is compared to the ideal American male of the day and those traits are …

Review: Michael Chapman, Ed., "The Drum Decade: Stories From The 1950s" And Lindy Stiebel And Liz Gunner, Ed., "Still Beating The Drum: Critical Perspectives On Lewis Nkosi", Shane Graham

English Faculty Publications

The negritude movement had Présence Africaine; the Harlem Renaissance had Crisis and Opportunity; South African writers of the 1950s had Drum magazine. Paul Gready has written that Drum’s “flashy muck-raking journalistic style attempted to capture the vivid life of the townships. Drum became a symbol of a new urban South Africa” (146); for Rob Nixon, it “amplified the voices of a defiantly impure cosmopolitanism, projecting an urban look and ethos” (28). Lewis Nkosi, who went to work for the magazine in 1957, said that Drum “wasn’t so much a magazine as it was a symbol of the new African cut …