Remembering through Retro TV and Cinema: Mad Men as Televisual Memorial to 60s America

Authors

  • Debarchana Baruah Post Graduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies/Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien (DGfA); Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.185

Keywords:

Memory, Post‑war America, Retro, Mad Men

Abstract

This article examines ways in which some contemporary American television and cinema set in the 1950s and 1960s such as Pleasantville“ and Mad Men“ share a critical engagement with the period they represent. The engagement is through the twin processes of identification and dissonance. The article describes this way of reviewing the past as retro representation. The article further explores the idea of retros as televisual memorials for the present, as they contribute to preserving memories of the represented period. Mad Men“ is examined as such a televisual memorial of the 60s.

 

Author Biography

Debarchana Baruah, Post Graduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies/Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien (DGfA); Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

Debarchana Baruah was born in Guwahati in north-east India. In 2005 she moved to Delhi and later completed her B.A. (2008), M.A. (2010), and M.Phil. (2012) in English Literature at the Department of English, University of Delhi. Ever since her graduate days she gravitated towards studies in American literature, and, in July 2012, Debarchana submitted her M.Phil dissertation entitled “Elusive Dreams: Suburbia in Post World War II American Literature”.

She began her doctoral program at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies in October 2012. The working title of her dissertation is “Memories of the postwar period in contemporary American popular cultures”. Her dissertation will examine the factors that create and circulate the contemporary desire to re-memorialize and return to the period following World War II and the significance of the period in the construction of American identities.

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Published

2014-05-31

How to Cite

Baruah, Debarchana. “Remembering through Retro TV and Cinema: Mad Men As Televisual Memorial to 60s America”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, May 2014, doi:10.5283/copas.185.

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 1 (2014)

Section

Articles

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Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.