College English Sep 1999

Textual Trouble in River City: Literacy, Rhetoric, and Consumerism in The Music Man

Harriet Malinowitz

Abstract

Offers a reading of “The Music Man” that traces the ways its charm and humor are undergirded by a parodic stance toward American values as rooted in turn-of-the-century discourses of literacy, education, morality, and in the simultaneously burgeoning national obsessing with buying and selling. Considers sexual and textual anxieties in the Progressive Era, “the repressed/repressive librarian,” and consumerist rhetoric.

Journal
College English
Published
1999-09-01
DOI
10.58680/ce19991160
Open Access
Closed
Topics
race and writing multilingual writers

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