Media@McGill is pleased to present the following event of "Culture on Mondays" an occasional series of lectures on popular media. Join us for this lecture in the series:
Sophistication, modernity and American magazines
By Dr. Faye Hammill, University of Strathclyde in Glasgow Time: 5:30 pm, Monday, 10 November, 2008
Place: Beaverbrook Seminar Room (230), 840 Dr. Penfield (Ferrier Building), McGill Campus.
Description: What is sophistication? Most of the usual answers to this question invalidate in advance any claim the asker might have to its enjoyment, along the lines of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." If you need the codes spelled out for you, you don't know how the codes work.- Leland Monk
Sophistication is rarely discussed explicitly, since it often provokes embarrassment or disavowal. It eludes definition, and yet provocatively invites us to pursue, capture and possess it. In this paper I will take up the challenge of asking what sophistication is, and how its codes work. More specifically, I will explore the discourses of sophistication which circulated in the smart magazines of early twentieth-century New York, focussing primarily on The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Both are ostensibly addressed to a restricted, metropolitan audience which is assumed to be already sophisticated, and yet their advertisements imply that sophistication can be learned. The paper will investigate the exclusionary practices of sophistication and the difficulty of maintaining these in a commercial context. It will also examine the tension between nostalgia and modernness in the smart magazines, and relate this to urban geographies of sophistication. The last part of the paper will suggest some comparisons between the earlier and more recent phases of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, surveying some of the latest issues and considering how the imagery of sophistication differs from the imagery of glamour.
Bio: Faye Hammill is senior lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Her research areas are Canadian literature and interwar middlebrow culture, and publications include Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada 1760-2000 (Rodopi, 2003), Canadian Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2007) and Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars (U of Texas P, 2007). She is a co-editor of the Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing 1900-1950 (Palgrave, 2006) and editor of The British Journal of Canadian Studies. She is currently leading the Middlebrow Network, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and working independently on the history of sophistication.