| Reading Guide for Week 8 | |
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Tuesday Hezekiah Butterworth (1839-1905) enjoyed a long career as an editor of a youth magazine, and an equally long career as an author of juvenile fiction, at a time when the white American middle class was increasingly investing in supposedly edifying materials for its teenagers. Those materials tended to be gender segregated, reserving imperial adventures mainly for teenaged boys. Even as he strove to entertain, Butterworth sought to inculcate what he imagined to be higher purpose and ambition in his readers. Edward Stratemeyer (1862-1930) would be an extraordinary publishing success story in the late 19th and early 20th century, both authoring and syndicating book series for American teenagers, eventually including series that you may recognize: The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew. Early in his literary career, en route to selling over half a billion (!) books in his lifetime, Stratemeyer’s themes were global and imperial, immediately drawing inspiration from the Spanish-American War. As with Butterworth’s, Stratemeyer’s books circulated images of foreign places and peoples, and instilled and reinforced cultural attitudes willingly internalized by many American teenagers as imagined what life in the wider world supposedly must be like. Thursday A history professor at Northwestern University, Daniel Immerwahr examines the remarkable history of the Marvel film franchise, its trajectory from failure in the 1990s to spectacular success in the 2000s and 2010s, its roots in superhero comic books from the 1940s and 1960s ... and its cultural relationship to American empire in the 2010s and 2020s. A television and film critic for various media outlets, including Vox, Emily St. James in this essay examines a third phase in the Marvel film franchise, which feature new kinds of unresolved ambiguities ... and which likewise lead to the question of American empire. |