The Simpsons' Beloved Springfield: Essays on the TV Series and Town That Are Part of Us All

by Karma Waltonen (Editor), Denise Du Vernay (Editor)

Overview

First aired in 1989, The Simpsons has become America's most beloved animated show. It changed the world of television, bringing to the screen a cartoon for adults, a sitcom without a laugh track, an imperfect lower class family, a mixture of high and low comedy and satire for the masses. This collection of new essays explores the many ways in which The Simpsons reflects everyday life through its exploration of gender roles, music, death, food politics, science and religion, anxiety, friendship and more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476636122
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Publication date:	08/30/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Karma Waltonen teaches professional writing, literature, popular culture (including The Simpsons), and stand-up comedy at the University of California, Davis. She is the president of the Margaret Atwood Society and edits Margaret Atwood Studies. Denise Du Vernay taught college courses in composition, literature, The Simpsons, speech, and the humanities for seventeen years. She is the treasurer and social media manager for the Margaret Atwood Society. She lives in Chicago, Illinois, where she works in Advancement for Loyola University Chicago.
A former president of the Margaret Atwood Society, Karma Waltonen is a senior lecturer in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis, where she won the Academic Federation Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015.
Denise Du Vernay has been teaching courses in composition, literature, The Simpsons, speech, and the humanities for more than ten years. She is a regular contributor to Matchflick.com and is currently working on her first novel. She lives near Chicago.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Putting the Spring in Springfield (Karma Waltonen and Denise Du Vernay)
The Simpsons Timeline (Forever Incomplete) (Karma Waltonen and Denise Du Vernay)
This Town Is a Part of Them (and Us) All (Denise Du Vernay )15
The Simpsons, Gender Roles and Witchcraft: The Witch in Modern Popular Culture (Sarah Antinora)
“Owning Your Okayness”: The Simpsons as “Good Enough”
delete delete Parents (Summer Block)
Be Sharp: The Simpsons and Music (Durrell Bowman)
RIP in Springfield: Rhetorics of Death (Jennifer Richardson Burg)
The Grotesque and the Beautiful: The Bodies of Springfield (Brent Walter Cline and Matthew Nelson Hill)
“Will you take us to Mt. Splashmore?”: Commercials and Consumerism (Brian N. Duchaney)
“I’ll repress the rage I’m feeling!”: Food Politics (Timothy L. Glenn)
This Is Not a Library! This Is Not a ­Kwik-E-Mart!: The Satire of Libraries, Librarians and Reference Desk ­Air-Hockey Tables (Casey D. Hoeve)
Just a Little Kick in the Bum: The Simpsons vs. the Nations of the World (Travis Holland)
“So you’re calling God a liar!”: An Unbiased Comparison of Science and Religion (Wm. Curtis Holtzen)
“Animation is built on plagiarism”: The Simpsons and Hitchcock, Parody and Pastiche (Zachary Ingle)
Is Yellow the New Green? The Banal Environmentalism of The Simpsons (David Krantz)
Fear of a Yellow Planet: The ­Eight-Fingered, Cartoon Version of Anxiety (Seth Madej)
In Search of Another Story: Satire and The Simpsons (Duncan Reyburn)
“It’s not selling out; it’s ­co-branding!”: Watching and Consuming The Simpsons in a Digital Age (Tyler Shores)
Aristotle in Springfield: On Friendship (Zachary Tavlin)
Homer as Homework: The Simpsons in the College Classroom (Lisa Whalen)
What We All Came Here to See—Sex (Karma Waltonen)
About the Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

The book provides a deeper reading of the show, discussing its music and film allusions and how it examines themes such as nationalism, gender roles, and environmentalism. ... This is a perfectly cromulent resource and a fun read. Simpsons fans will appreciate academics geeking out, and scholars will benefit from this embiggening of Simpson-ology.”—Library Journal

From the Publisher