Abstract
Who is Don Draper? This seemingly simple question motivates our engagement with Mad Men (2007–2015). Showrunner Matt Weiner references literary texts from the poetry of Frank O’Hara to the Modernist novels of William Faulkner. The intertextual operations of Mad Men provide a springboard for a more imaginative critical foray into adaptation studies. How and why has contemporary television surpassed the novel in its ability to express the meaning of an individual life within a given social order? Building upon the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, we illuminate Don Draper within a web of polyphonic references that define his relationship to American society. A vast web of artistic encounters—with Walt Whitman, Don Quixote, Bewitched, Scheherazade, and Madame Bovary—reveals that Don Draper is… us.
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Lee, H.J., Metz, W. (2021). “Draped in the American Flag, Burning”: Mad Men and the Literary Tradition. In: Winckler, R., Huertas-Martín, V. (eds) Television Series as Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4720-1_16
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