AM 376R: Magazines and Modernity (4)
Janet C. Casey, PMH 315, x5183
The number and variety of American magazines exploded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading historians to call this era the "golden age" of periodical development. This course will introduce you to this wealth of primary material and to the theoretical concerns of scholars who study the roles of magazines in reflecting and creating modern culture. We will read magazines as cultural documents in order to explore, for example, the rise of modern advertising; the shaping of gendered, classed, and racialized readerships; and the popular advancement, and occasional subversion, of dominant ideological perspectives (of nation, of domesticity, of labor, of consumption). We will also consider the enormous influence of certain turn-of-the-century editors and their business policies, including the sophisticated relations they created among internal magazine elements so as to streamline their cultural messages. In addition to substantial theoretical and historical reading and regular short research and writing assignments, each student will be responsible for a major semester-long project that will involve intensive study of a period magazine in the Scribner collection.