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Note from the Editor
While this issue was in preparation, the movie version of Sex and the City opened. Chicago Tribune columnist, John Kass, who specializes in curmudgeonly columns about Illinois corruption—ample material for three to four columns per week—attracted much attention by posting on the paper's website a "Get Out of 'Sex and the City' Card," to enable "innocent men" to avoid being "compelled, or enticed, or whined at or nagged, etc." into attending. While claiming that he supports well-made "Guy Cry Movies," Kass insisted, "No man should feel the agony of this film." In a follow-up column about the storm-in-a-glass he had set off, he provocatively remarked, "If any man had written such whiny, shallow, stereotyped characters, he'd be whipped until his hair was as white as Phil Donahue's."
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Now, my spouse has no interest in Sex and the City, and I can't work up much indignation against even the overbearing fashion references that adhere to it, so I have not faced Kass's dilemma. I would certainly endure this movie better than one with Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson. But Kass's assault made one wonder whether—in terms of gender and aesthetic sensibility—the past is as much a foreign country as historians tend to declare it. As David Sehat explains, playwright Clyde Fitch had great success writing mannered comedies and dramas aimed at respectable/genteel female audiences. His plays featured what high-minded critics dismissed as shallow, stereotyped characters, though it was generally champions of the male genre of realism who whipped him. Dissatisfied with his status as a popular writer with a supposedly feminine sensibility, Fitch struggled to produce plays that were masculine in their seriousness, with mixed results. One way that our perspective is probably foreign from Fitch's is that the modernist assault on realism and then the post-modernist assault on modernism have intervened, so that even John Kass (who did not claim to be a careful literary critic) might be disinclined to equate the male with the real and the female with the mannered and artificial. Many self-consciously masculine works that nowadays win acclaim for having artistic credibility—Clint Eastwood's movies leap to mind—are deliberately stylized, while one could come up with very many examples of realistic drama and literature that strives for a feminine perspective or sensibility. Whereas the realists saw themselves as progressive in Fitch's day, nowadays people with cultivated tastes in literature, drama, and movies are likely to disdain works that strive for too much realism as contrived and even vulgar.
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Tom Culbertson's selections from the Hayes Center's recent exhibit of Gilded Age political cartoons do reveal an aesthetic sensibility removed from that of the present. Cartooning in our time can be subtle, full, and even crowded, but rarely is it lush in the way that was routine 125 years ago. Some of this results from wide differences in artistic training and sensibility. Over the last century many great cartoonists—like many artists—strove to evoke as much as possible with the simplest lines. As Culbertson explains, much of the lush, evocative style of the Gilded Age cartoonists reflected a different set of cultural and literary references shared with audiences. But crucial to understanding Gilded Age cartooning were medium and printing technique. Engravings in Gilded Age satirical weeklies such as Judge or Puck appealed to mainstream audiences, while modern equivalents, such as the more sophisticated comic books or Mad Magazine, have never shaken the air of being offbeat, slightly juvenile tastes.
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| The two articles in this issue with international themes raise the problem of the distance or proximity of the past in different ways. A subculture of writers has emerged who use the example of Rome to brood over American empire and its fate. A century ago, as Kristofer Allerfeldt documents, Rome as a reference point for discussions of imperialism required little stretching on the part of commentators or audiences, though the lessons drawn from the Roman example were as arbitrary and protean as they are now. While the two countries' attitudes toward Italian immigration to the United States were complex, the United States and Italy pursued quarrels over Italian Americans conscripted into the Italian military with a blunt nationalism that at least makes the situation fairly easy to understand, as Bahar Gürsel reveals. A great deal of what is distressing about immigration issues in the United States and the European Union in the early twenty-first century stems from the alarming convolution of legal systems, immigration bureaucracies and politics, and security policies, so that people can be treated in a brutish or arbitrary way at a hundred points, rather than one or two. |
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Alan Lessoff
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