21st Century Retro: "Mad Men" and 1960s America in Film and Television

by Debarchana Baruah

Overview

Numerous contemporary televisual productions revisit the past but direct their energies towards history's non-events and anti-heroic subjectivities. Debarchana Baruah offers a vocabulary to discuss these, using Mad Men as a primary case study and supplementing the analysis with other examples from the US and around the world. She takes a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to studying film and television, drawing from history, memory, and nostalgia discourses, and layering them with theories of intertextuality, paratexts, and actor-networks. The book's compositions style invites discussions from scholars of various fields, as well as those who are simply fans of history or of Mad Men.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783837657210
Publication date:	04/27/2021
Series:	American Culture Studies
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.86(h) x (d)

About the Author

Debarchana Baruah is a cultural theorist at the American Studies department, University of Tübingen. She completed her doctoral studies at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Heidelberg University and received her B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. degrees in English Literature from the University of Delhi. She is interested in US popular cultures, film and television, memory cultures, food cultures, and immigration histories.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter 1
Contents 5
Acknowledgements 11
Introduction 13
Chapter 1: Retro 37
Chapter 2: History in Retros 67
Chapter 3: Television Memories and Intertextualities in Mad Men 99
Chapter 4: Mad Men and its Paratexts 133
Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network 165
Conclusion 197
List of Mad Men Episodes Cited 207
Works Cited 213

Editorial Reviews

"This book is undoubtedly a great achievement and presents a valuable resource for everyone interested in the retro mode, nostalgia, memory, and, of course, in Mad Men and its retroperspective on the United States in the 1960s."

Kathleen Loock

"A lush and exhaustive inspection of the ideas and tools of retro in film and TV, that will appeal to more than just a few readers, as nostalgia and audiovisual pleasures of the past seemingly attract all audiences sooner or later."

A. Ebert