Myth and History in American Memory

In the Arcades Project, German philosopher Walter Benjamin famously said that history decays into myth. To put it another way, history diverges from how it is understood in cultural contexts. If so, why might a specific cultural representation come to supplant its related history? Or why might that particular representation become entrenched in American culture? And for that matter, how can we know that a representation has become entrenched? To answer these questions and more, this seminar considers how a specific memory of the American past – a conception of the 1950s – is remembered in American culture, which today also means understanding how it circulates in and through the new media ecology.

Course planning

The blockbuster film Back to the Future (1985) not only inspired my course planning, it offered a mediated representation of the 1950s to analyze while also providing an unexpected roadmap to a specific cultural moment replete with material to study. In the film, Marty, the main character, inadvertently travels back to 1955 after an experimental mishap. As it happens, he arrives in a fictionalized midwest town during the throes of a tumultuous decade which is underrepresented in the film. Instead, the plot centers on the financial misfortunes of a white family and their emasculated patriarch.

As the fictionalized version of the era unfolded in the film, photographers like Gordon Parks and Robert Frank were at work documenting life in the United States. The film Rebel Without a Cause was released in the middle of the decade, and at about the same time, the photography exhibit “Family of Man” opened at the Museum of Modern Art under the direction of Edward Steichen. What is more, James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room and The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a collaboration between Langston Hughes and photographer Roy DeCarava were both published in the middle of the decade. Also, Parker Brothers developed the board game Careers in 1955, which required players to develop a formula for success based on a valuation of fame, money, and happiness. These cultural texts represented the primary source material. My pedagogical strategy was to revisit the decade through this material to better understand its contemporary representation.