Noted: Caroline Levine?s essay ?The Shock of the Banal: Mad Men?s Progressive Realism? provides an especially apt description of how the show works to create a distinct relationship between past and present that?s neither simply nostalgic nor a celebration of how far we?ve come. The dynamic of “Mad Men” is, in her terms, ?the play of familiarity in strangeness? that comes from seeing ?our everyday assumptions just far enough removed from us to feel distant.? (Levine is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.)
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