Turned Back: Mad Men as Intermedial Melodrama

This essay draws on definitions of gesture (Giorgio Agamben and Peter Brooks) and catachresis (Peter Brooks, Jacques Derrida) to examine the primacy of non-verbal signifiers as communicators of meaning in AMC’s Mad Men. Beginning with an analysis of Mad Men’s credit sequence, it draws attention to Mad Men’s use of gesture and catachresis in relation to melodrama’s privileging of non-verbal and naturalistic expression and its persistence as an intermedial mode that has moved back and forth between various media (theatre, novel, cinema, television and now digital formats). It argues that Mad Men’s melodramatic aesthetic is one that obliquely, and via a gestural and rhetorical ‘turned back’, communicates its relation to the past and the present

Turned Back Mad Men as Intermedial Melodrama

In the opening, animated sequence of AMC's 'Mad Men', a silhouetted figure - a businessman - appears with his back turned towards us. In business suit, briefcase in hand, this figure is shown entering an office that, almost immediately, begins to melt. As wall pictures, a desk, chairs and office fan dissolve, the black-suited figure is now reeling through the air, having jumped or fallen from the office skyscraper. As his body drops and turns during the fall, it passes giant billboards of 1960s advertising images and slogans. Over the blonde head of a glamorous model is the promise that you will 'enjoy the best America has to offer' and that 'it's the gift that never fails'. The cartoon credit sequence ends with the falling figure, not reaching ground zero, seated on a couch - his back again turned towards us - looking into a blank, white distance with his arm outstretched in an (overly) familiar gesture of business confidence

Wake In Fright

Abstrac

Introduction: Common Readers and Cultural Critics

Introduction to JASAL Special Issue: Common Readers and Cultural Critic

Dendritic cells are crucial for maintenance of tertiary lymphoid structures in the lung of influenza virus–infected mice

Tertiary lymphoid organs (TLOs) are organized aggregates of B and T cells formed in postembryonic life in response to chronic immune responses to infectious agents or self-antigens. Although CD11c+ dendritic cells (DCs) are consistently found in regions of TLO, their contribution to TLO organization has not been studied in detail. We found that CD11chi DCs are essential for the maintenance of inducible bronchus-associated lymphoid tissue (iBALT), a form of TLO induced in the lungs after influenza virus infection. Elimination of DCs after the virus had been cleared from the lung resulted in iBALT disintegration and reduction in germinal center (GC) reactions, which led to significantly reduced numbers of class-switched plasma cells in the lung and bone marrow and reduction in protective antiviral serum immunoglobulins. Mechanistically, DCs isolated from the lungs of mice with iBALT no longer presented viral antigens to T cells but were a source of lymphotoxin (LT) β and homeostatic chemokines (CXCL-12 and -13 and CCL-19 and -21) known to contribute to TLO organization. Like depletion of DCs, blockade of LTβ receptor signaling after virus clearance led to disintegration of iBALT and GC reactions. Together, our data reveal a previously unappreciated function of lung DCs in iBALT homeostasis and humoral immunity to influenza virus

Carolyn Williams, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English MelodramaChristine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures

The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama and Melodrama Unbound are excellent exemplars of a recent turn in melodrama studies toward transmedial, transnational, and trans-historical approaches. The two edited volumes are essential reading for melodrama scholars working in the fields of theatre, film, television, gender studies, and musicology