- Magazines and Modernity

Catalog description

A study of early twentieth-century American magazines as both reflecting and shaping modern culture.  The course focuses on such topics as 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, domesticity, labor, and/or consumption. It also considers 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 is responsible for a major semester-long project that involves intensive study of a period magazine in the Scribner collection.