William Wetherall:
Japanese pulp magazines
2017 preface
“Reading this paper half a century later, I would grade it “C” on my
overall scale, meaning “fair with quite a few serious problems”. Knowing
what I think I know better today than I did then, I wax between
cynically disputing every assertion I made in the paper, and generously
dismissing only 20 or 30 percent of what I wrote.I wrote the paper to showcase a variety of real and imaginary
research and analytical abilities, applied to topics and materials drawn
from popular culture. Mass magazines and their content were totally
beyond the scope of “serious” contemporary scholarship, which was
supposed to be about economic, political, and social institutions,
intellectual history, religion and philosophy, and the fine arts. De
Vos’s lectures, however, had left me with the impression that he might
accept the subject matter of my paper – and he did. I did not yet know
him personally, and was prepared for a lower grade, but he gave my paper
an “A” and wrote a number of remarks which indicated that he liked what
I did or tried to to do. Tellingly, he did not comment on my odd jargon
and pretentious style, nor mark a single spelling, grammar, or usage
problem. This was a new experience for me, as most of my papers came
back with at least some remarks about the mechanics of writing….