Donald Draper filosofo della nostalgia = Donald Draper as a Philosopher of Nostalgia

Abstract

Donald Draper as a Philosopher of Nostalgia. In contemporary media studies, the TV series Mad Men has been analyzed as an example of a nostalgic attitude towards a past era. In this paper, I will proceed the other way round. Instead of using the notion of nostalgia in order to analyze Mad Men, I will use Mad Men in order to characterize on the notion of nostalgia. For this purpose, I will focus on Donald Draper’s monologue about nostalgia in the last episode of Mad Men’s first season. I will argue that this scene of Mad Men, through its words, its pictures and its sounds, provides us with an insightful philosophical account of nostalgia, understood as a peculiar mental state involving memory, desire and emotion.