Event Description:​

“How is it that at the very moment when Americans were first entering the age of television, millions of books were being sold—and read—across the country? What did cheap paperbacks offer their postwar readers—and why do they continue to intrigue us today?

Pulp enthusiast and American cultural studies scholar Paula Rabinowitz (University of Minnesota) will be speaking at UMass Boston on March 4th at 4:00 in Campus Center 3545 to tell the story of how pulps transmitted the ideas, images, and sensations of modern life across a nation divided by class, race, gender, and sexuality.

Rabinowitz starts from her memories of pocket-sized paperbacks lovingly stacked on her mother’s nightstand to tell a sweeping story of pulp’s lasting impact on literary, material, political, and visual culture. Rabinowitz convincingly argues that the history of paperbacks from the late 1930s and early 1960s mirrors that of America’s modernization in the mid-twentieth century.

Often associated with crime, romance, and science fiction, pulps blur the lines between canon and kitsch, high and low, fiction and nonfiction, and text and image. These quasi-ephemeral objects—cheaper than a pack of cigarettes, available everywhere, and sometimes selling in the millions—were picked up by readers of every kind and came in every genre and subject. Rabinowitz shows how paperbacks gave gay, lesbian, and African American writers voices and audiences in the mid-twentieth century. Analyzing their titillating packaging as well as their content, Rabinowitz reveals an important cultural form in American history that continues to influence culture today.”

The New Yorker‘s review: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/pulps-big-moment