The display is open 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. weekdays, at the University of Illinois Press, 1325 S. Oak St. in Champaign.  There will be a special reception with light refreshments on Friday, April 5, from 3:00-5:00 p.m.   All viewings, and the reception, are free and open to the public.

Featured in this year’s show are two covers designed for University of Illinois Press books: Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (author Greg Goodale) and From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity (author Miles White).

A high quality catalog shows each entry in full color with typographic, paper, printing, and binding information, along with designers’ and judges’ comments.  A limited number of catalog copies will be available for free.

Q: What is the Wheeler-Lea Amendment that was passed in 1938?

Stole: The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 had given the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) jurisdiction over advertising, but only in cases where one business used advertising to gain an unfair advantage over another.  This meant that the FTC lacked the authority to intervene on consumers’ behalf when they were wronged, even harmed, by false and misleading advertising.  Thus there was considerable momentum for stricter advertising regulation by the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933.  In June of that year, a bill to amend the 1906 Food and Drugs Act was introduced in Congress.  The measure called for new labeling laws and mandatory grading of goods to help guide consumers in the marketplace.  It also sought to empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prohibit false advertising of food, drugs, or cosmetics.

Major manufacturers generally had no objection to a ban on false advertising, but their reaction to the proposed ban on the use of “ambiguity and inference” caused strong and adverse reactions.  It was exactly the use of clever advertising to create enough ambiguity for consumers to infer the desirability of one product over another, even if none existed, that drove most of the consumer industry, and thus much of capitalism in general.

This set the stage for a five-year legislative battle, with congressional hearings on several revised versions of the bill.  Helping the advertising industry’s cause was a set of well-developed public relations and lobbying strategies combines with considerable influence
over the commercial mass media. Few among the general public were fully informed about the issues at stake.  With each new version of the bill, industry concerns took the front seat, and the issue of consumer protection, which been the original impetus for the measure, gradually faded from the agenda.  Despite demands from consumer groups, New Dealers, and government regulatory agencies, advertisers survived the battle with surprising ease.  The Wheeler-Lea Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act was passed in 1938, but it only minimally affected existing advertising practices.  Although false advertising was banned, the bill did not outlaw the use of “ambiguity and inference” and the call for commodity grading never materialized into law.  Today, 75 years later, The Wheeler-Lea Amendment is still the reigning law on advertising in the US.

Q: Did it have the intended effect on the advertising industry?

Stole: Although the FTC managed to crack down on the advertising practices of some big national advertisers and slap them with rather mild fines, the mass media, with their
close financial ties to these manufacturers, did not publicize the cease-and-desist orders. Because of this, the lengthy appeals procedure might be well underway before the public ever learned, for example, that the FTC had found several advertising claims by Listerine antiseptic to be unsubstantiated or that it had ordered a stop to Helena Rubenstein’s claims that its “Eye Lash Grower Cream” would cause the lashes to grow and that one of its face powders would prevent skin blemishes.  The immediate and somewhat ironic result of the law on advertising copy was a tendency to glamorize products and employ indirect assertion.  Because it was relatively easy to check the truthfulness of verbal claims, advertisements relied more heavily on illustrations to get around the law.  A pictorial illustration could pass whereas a verbal presentation might not.  This practice revealed the shortcomings of the new law as well as its general failure to encourage advertisers to provide consumers with more factual information.

Q: How did the advertising industry come to support the U.S. war effort during the 1940s?

Stole: After having secured The Wheeler Lea Amendment as legislative victory, the advertising industry faced a set of new and severe challenges.  During the Great Depression, the advertising industry and its business allies, with strong support from the advertising-based news media, had stressed the importance of advertising as a tool for creating consumer demand and eventually getting the economy back on track.  By early 1940, with an impending war on the horizon, the argument was unraveling.  Raw materials for domestic consumer goods had quickly become in short supply, causing the government to impose rationing and price control.  Thus, for advertisers to promote products that were scarce or unavailable might have an inflationary effect and possibly cause black markets. Although desperate to keep their brand names before the public, the advertising industry  worried that product advertising might be viewed as problematic, if not downright unpatriotic, by the American public.

The government’s need for increasing revenues added to the industry’s concern.  Ever since the First World War, businesses had been allowed to claim their advertising as a tax deductible expense.  By all accounts this had the effect of dramatically increasing the amount of advertising that businesses did.  Now, however, considering the limited need  for advertising, advertisers faced the possibility of having this tax-deductible privilege revoked.  Moreover, in a period in which the government was begging, borrowing and taxing at unprecedented levels to support the war effort, the notion that businesses could deduct advertising expenses from their taxable income when advertising served no purpose was problematic.  In November 1941, a few weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, key members of the advertising industry met to discuss their dire situation. The meeting produced the outline of an industry-wide public relations program to protect  advertising.  The crucial idea was for the industry’s leading trade associations to establish a new group to advance the industry’s PR agenda.  Then, within weeks, America was embroiled in an all-out war.  Soon thereafter, and to the advertising industry’s surprise, the government’s newly created Office for War Information (OWI) approached the industry, asking for help in mobilizing popular support for its home front campaigns.

By early 1942, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) officially formed the Advertising Council Inc., which was renamed the War Advertising Council (WAC) between 1943 and 1945 and  positioned as a private adjunct to the government’s war information efforts, in part to protect the advertising industry from regulations.  Because the OWI had too small a  budget for the task at hand, it wanted the Advertising Council to serve as a de facto part of the OWI.

Q: Were the advertising efforts successful?

Stole: When war ended in 1945, the advertising industry believed it had done its patriotic duty and was not afraid to say so.  During the 1,307 days of war, it had encouraged the  American public to purchase more than 800 million war bonds and to plant 50 million victory gardens, as well as raising several million dollars for the Red Cross and the National War Fund Drives.  It had also fought inflation, recruited military personnel, spread information about a wide variety of salvage campaigns, and enlisted workers for industrial war-plants.  All in all, the (War) Adver­tising Council had been involved in more than 150 different home-front campaigns and, by its own estimate, had contributed more than $1 billion in time, space, and talent toward the war effort.

While the advertising industry proudly reminded the public of these contributions to the war effort, it was less likely to publicly discuss the PR rewards it had reaped from its war related activities.

Q: What were the long term postwar effects of the advertiser/politician relationship?

Stole: Largely as a result of the Advertising Council’s relentless work, the advertising industry enjoyed improved relations with the public as the war faded from view.  Moreover, and just as importantly; the intimate working relationship between industry, and government leaders continued into the postwar era, growing ever more congenial.  The Council continued its cooperation with the US government into the postwar era, working on campaigns to defend “American values” and capitalism at home and abroad, blurring the lines between industry goals and government concerns.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Stole: Writing this book made me (increasingly) aware of the advertising industry’s political and economic impact.  To the extent that advertising is discussed in our contemporary society, it is a conversation that tends to focus on advertising’s symbolic nature; how certain advertising images help shape people’s views of themselves, other and society in general.  While interesting and important questions, they fail to address the issue of why we have the kind of advertising we do or why advertising, which after all is a regulated industry, has assumed such a central role in our political economy.  My work on Advertising At War has confirmed the importance of historical research to fill some of the gaps.

L. Andrew Cooper

Q: How does Dario Argento’s work fit into the genre of “giallo?”

Cooper: The “giallo” is an Italian crime thriller set apart by violent, extravagant set pieces. “Giallo” means yellow, and the term refers to the yellow covers traditionally associated with the crime novels (often Italian translations of English-language originals) that inspired many of the films.  Argento’s directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) took the giallo to new levels of intricate mayhem, and his fifth feature, Deep Red (1975), experimented with nightmarish visuals that helped make it one of the genre’s most successful films.  Giallo conventions appear in almost all of Argento’s films, but Suspiria (1977) and other supernaturally-themed films stray too far from the giallo’s core of crime and mystery to qualify. His purest later gialli are probably Tenebre (1982), which features one of Argento’s easiest-to-follow (yet still awfully baroque) storylines, and Sleepless (2001), a late return-to-form that has helped to keep the giallo alive in the twenty-first century.

Q: Argento is thought of mostly for his horror films.  Is his work in other genres overlooked?

Cooper: Argento has often said that he can accomplish everything he wants to do with character and imagery in horror films and gialli.  His one feature outside these genres, The Five Days of Milan (1973), is worth seeing because it carries the director’s visual and narrative eccentricities into new territory, but it is a minor work.  In Argento’s films, genre provides a platform for stylistic experimentation unbounded by the norms of realism and rationality.  Horror is a starting point for thinking and feeling in Argento’s films: looking at where each film goes from that point, rather than focusing on genre as a limitation, might be the best way to approach Argento’s work.

Q: Early in his career Argento was called “the Italian Hitchcock.”  Was that a valid comparison?

Cooper: Yes and no.  The giallo, like its American cousin the slasher, builds explicitly on Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).  Because Argento gave the giallo visual intensity akin to what Hitchcock typically brought to his subjects, Argento was branded as “the Italian Hitchcock” almost immediately after The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.  As I argue in my book, Bird is already in dialogue with Psycho and the traditions it inaugurated; the label “the Italian Hitchcock” helped to extend this dialogue throughout Argento’s career, culminating in Argento’s film Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005).  Despite the obvious importance of Hitchcock in Argento’s work, however, the comparison is somewhat superficial.  Popular perceptions of Hitchcock frame him as a master storyteller with acute psychological insight.  By contrast, Argento’s films privilege neither story nor psychology, preferring disorienting, abstract imagery and narratives that defy human agency and logical sense.

Q: Who are some filmmakers which Argento has influenced over his long career?

Cooper: Filmmakers around the world acknowledge Argento as an important influence. George Romero (Dawn of the Dead, 1978), John Carpenter (Halloween, 1978), James Wan (Saw, 2004), Pascal Laugier (Martyrs, 2008), Mick Garris (Masters of Horror, TV, 2005 – 2007), Takashi Miike (Audition, 1999), Eli Roth (Hostel, 2005), and Quentin
Tarantino (Death Proof, 2007) are only a few of the filmmakers who have  explicitly acknowledged Argento’s contributions to their stylistic development.

Q: Many of Argento’s films are both violent and visually striking.  His critics have claimed his  excessive visuals are at the expense of narrative.  Is this a valid criticism?

Cooper: The many critics who condemn Argento’s films for bad storytelling and bad acting miss one of Argento’s most important contributions to the history of cinema: over several decades, his work has developed a sustained critique of narrative and psychological conventions.  My book explores this critique in detail, so here I’ll limit myself to saying that Argento gives horror/grindhouse audiences what Michelangelo Antonioni started giving arthouse audiences in the 1960s.  Like Antonioni’s, Argento’s films explore untenable searches for truth amidst the fragmentation of (post)modern
existence.  The two filmmakers’ generic and visual vocabularies differ radically, and they don’t always point toward the same conclusions, but their attacks on traditionally accessible narrative follow similar courses.

Q: How does Argento handle sexuality and gender issues in his films?

Cooper: Controversially.  I believe that the man himself has views of sexuality and gender that most people would call progressive, but the man’s views are less important than the difficult depictions of sexuality and gender in his works.  He most often comes under attack for the films’ graphic violence against women, whose bodies are objectified and torn apart in film after film.  As a result, some critics dismiss his films as misogynistic.  Such  dismissals rarely take into account the self-conscious strategies that the films use to call attention to the cultural processes that dehumanize women and men alike.  Some critics also see the frequent appearance of queer characters as symptoms of homophobia, but they also fail to account for ways in which the strikingly frequent appearance of queerness undermines sexual prejudice.  In Argento’s films, aestheticized violence turns toward ethical ends, and those ends include exposing misogyny and homophobia as shallow and ignorant structures of feeling.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Cooper: Argento is one of the most written-about directors in popular cinema, but very little of that writing is academic.  Academics are often blinded to his work’s cultural significance because they can’t see past (or see with and through) the lowbrow status of the horror genre or the disturbing violence of the horrific imagery.  What surprised me most is how consistently and pervasively Argento’s films speak to academic critics’ concerns.  I find a lot of “auteur” criticism uninteresting because it indulges in myths of solitary artistic genius and fallacies of intention, but even as Argento’s films raise questions about the possibility of individual agency and the desirability of coherent narrative, the corpus as a whole is individually distinct and offers a remarkably coherent vision.  I don’t really care whether this vision was born from Argento’s conscious intent, but I see the vision clearly across his works, and the longer I look at this vision, the more profound it seems.

Life of Pi

Shilpa Davé, author of the forthcoming University of Illinois Press book Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film, writes about the “South Asian Invasion” of this year’s Academy Awards.

In an article for the South Asian American Digital Archive blog, Davé writes that Life of Pi wasn’t the only film recognized by the Academy in which Indian accents were thriving.

(Photo: Loren Javier, Flickr Creative Commons)

“Arturo Toscanini came to town as part of a highly publicized maestro exchange between the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic that had been set up by Arthur Judson, manager of both orchestras.”

“The Useless Mouths” and Other Literary Writings, by Simone de Beauvoir and edited by Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann

Making Sense of American Liberalism, edited by Jonathan Bell and Timothy Stanley

Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance: Igniting Citizenship, by Yvonne Daniel

The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture, by Jared Gardner

How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse, by John Timberman Newcomb

Comprising just over 9 percent of the titles reviewed by CHOICE during the past year, and less than 3 percent of the more than 25,000 titles submitted to CHOICE during this same period, Outstanding Academic Titles are truly the “best of the best.” Congratulations to our authors, editors, and to everyone who worked on these titles!

Our books make great holiday gifts, and Dusty Rhodes at the University of Illinois News Bureau agrees. She’s included John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle’s Picturing Illinois: Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo in the annual campus holiday gift guide from Inside Illinois.

For more gift-worthy books on Illinois topics and from local authors, check out Christmas in Illinois edited by James Ballowe; Illini Loyalty: The University of Illinois by Larry and Alaina Kanfer; Edible Wild Mushrooms of Illinois and Surrounding States: A Field-to-Kitchen Guide by Joe McFarland and Gregory M. Mueller; Honey, I’m Homemade: Sweet Treats from the Beehive across the Centuries and around the World by May Berenbaum; and our many books on Abraham Lincoln.

The publications of the Beethoven Sketchbook Series from the University of Illinois Press have advanced into this unknown territory. Each of these editions of major sketchbooks contains a color facsimile of the original source reproduced at full size, together with an interpretative transcription and extensive commentary. Since the facsimiles provide access to the visually fascinating but cluttered and highly revised manuscripts, the transcriptions can inquire into the meaning and not just the letter of Beethoven’s inspiring brainstorms of activity. The accompanying commentaries place this new material into the context of parallel sources and biographical issues, recreating for the reader the composer’s creative struggles.

These new editions can be compared to the first probes of Venus or Mars, since instead of isolated glimpses, the entire surface of the object of investigation is revealed for the first time. The first such edition targeted Beethoven’s major sketchbook of 1820, Artaria 195: Beethoven’s Sketchbook for the Missa solemnis and the Piano Sonata in E Major, Opus 109. The editor, transcriber, and author of the commentary is William Kinderman, general editor of the Beethoven Sketchbook Series.

The second edition of the Beethoven Sketchbook Series makes available the most famous of the composer’s sketchbooks, the “Eroica” Sketchbook used by Beethoven between 1802 and 1804. Startling new insights are revealed in this edition, which was completed jointly by Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman. Fresh insight is offered into the genesis of not only the “Eroica” Symphony, but the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the composer’s sole opera Fidelio, and various fascinating unknown and fragmentary projects. Lockwood and Gosman’s edition, Beethoven’s “Eroica” Sketchbook: A Critical Edition, will be published in early 2013.

Recent research has moved beyond Beethoven and beyond music. Kinderman’s new book from the University of Illinois Press, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág, explores the creativity of major composers from the eighteenth century to the present. He shows that a view of the arts confined to isolated canonic masterpieces is seriously impoverished. At the same time, many secrets about and fresh perspectives on deceptively familiar canonic works can be gained through research that sees cultural products as a struggle emerging out of history. This approach, dubbed “genetic criticism” in France, is a fruitful alternative to the rigid structuralism that so easily blinds commentators to the important spontaneous aspects of artistic activity. A recent interdisciplinary exploration of this approach is Kinderman’s edited book with Joseph E. Jones, Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater from the University of Rochester Press.

Kinderman has recorded as pianist Beethoven’s major keyboard works from the period of the Artaria 195 sketchbook: the final trilogy of Sonatas in E major, A-flat major, and C minor, opp. 109-111 (available on Arietta Records).  For the second movement of the Sonata in E major, op. 109, an innovative website allows the user to explore all stages in Beethoven’s creation of the music, tracing the process from initial sketch to finished work, acorn to oak. The facsimiles of the sketches, transcriptions of their content, and realization in sound of the music are coordinated, drawing on the material from the three-volume edition of Artaria 195.

Another much-praised recording by Kinderman of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations is also available on Arietta Records. Kinderman’s book Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations from Oxford University Press and his CD recording of this work were a major influence on Moises Kaufman’s much-performed play, 33 Variations.

“Adults have also used the holiday to make known to others their desires for the future. Robert Green Ingersoll, the son of a Presbyterian abolitionist minister, taught in Mount Vernon and Metropolis and practiced law in Shawneetown and Peoria. He was a colonel in the Union army and after the war became Illinois attorney general before becoming prominent on the national stage. In his ‘Christmas Sermon,’ written in 1892, he said, ‘I believe in Christmas and in every day that has been set aside for joy.’ The following requests for Christmas, written in 1897, express his humanism.

If I had the power to produce exactly what I want for next Christmas, I would have all the kings and emperors resign and allow the people to govern themselves.

I would have all the nobility crop their titles and give their lands back to the people. I would have the pope throw away his tiara, take off his sacred vestments, and admit that he is not acting for God—is not infallible—but is just an ordinary Italian. I would have all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, and clergymen admit that they know nothing about theology, nothing about hell or heaven, nothing about the destiny of the human race, nothing about devils or ghosts, gods or angels. I would have them tell all their “flocks” to think for themselves, to be manly men and womanly women, and to do all in their power to increase the sum of human happiness.

I would have all the professors in colleges, all the teachers in schools of every kind, including those in Sunday schools, agree that they would teach only what they know, that they would not palm off guesses as demonstrated truths.

I would like to see all the politicians changed to statesmen—to men who long to make their country great and free; to men who care more for public good than private gain—men who long to be of use.

I would like to see all the editors of papers and magazines agree to print the truth and nothing but the truth, to avoid all slander and misrepresentation, and to let the private affairs of the people alone.

I would like to see drunkenness and prohibition both abolished.

I would like to see corporal punishment done away with in every home, in every school, in every asylum, reformatory, and prison. Cruelty hardens and degrades; kindness reforms and ennobles.

I would like to see the millionaires unite and form a trust for the public good.

I would like to see a fair division of profits between capital and labor, so that the toiler could save enough to mingle a little June with the December of his life.

I would like to see an international court established in which to settle disputes between nations, so that armies could be disbanded and the great navies allowed to rust and rot in perfect peace.

I would like to see the whole world free—free from injustice—free from superstition.

This will do for next Christmas. The following Christmas, I may want more.”

There are likely to be sightings of folklorist, musician, and author Stephen Wade, who may stop by the University of Illinois Press’s tables to sign copies of The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, available at the 40% discount.

We will also have information on our ongoing Mellon-funded project, Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World. Complete details may be found at www.folklorestudies.org. Funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the series is a collaborative venture of the University of Illinois Press, the University Press of Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin Press, in conjunction with the American Folklore Society.

So come by our tables and say, “Hello!”