Maybe Cropper's auction didn't get enough pre-sale publicity. The Washington Post published a story about the quintet below the headline, "Advertising Gets Personal: Rule No. If you win the auction, I will wear your T-shirt with logo to campus on the days I teach" for one week.Ī big cash payout didn't materialize as it has for others, including five Arizona State University students who last month auctioned off ad space on their bellies to a mortgage company for $1,575. "Coaches aren't the only ones with a marketable presence on campus. "Want to get your message to the coveted 18-25-year-old market?" Cropper wrote in his eBay post. It also opened the door for his younger brother to take a playful shot at him. This highly enjoyable volume is recommended to both scholars and students interested in the topic.PROVO - A Brigham Young University professor auctioned off advertising space on his shirt last week to supplement his income and drive home a point to his students.įrench professor Corry Cropper's eBay auction generated few bidders, so it accomplished only one of his objectives. An instructor could have students act out scenes from these plays, followed by a discussion about gender and social norms. All the plays are easily accessible and entertaining.
With a vulgar reference to Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets (1748), Stephana’s Jewel ( Le bijou de Stephana) provides the most Orientalist depiction of Mormons. A marriage broker features prominently in one of the plays, Japheth’s Twelve Wives, and Cropper and Flood remind us that at the time, 25% of marriages in France were arranged by marriage brokers. While the plays end with traditional bourgeois values being reinstated, the plays bring up issues about gender roles and divorce that were being hotly debated in France at the time. The central comparison made in all the performances is between a foreign religion that practices polygamy and respectable French society where men both marry and maintain mistresses. All four plays focus heavily on marriage. The plays exoticize the Mormons, at one point comparing their practices with those of Muslims ( Stephana’s Jewel). The authors suggest some intriguing connections between France’s longstanding attraction to Orientalism and the Otherness of Mormon polygamists. Cropper and Flood draw a sharp distinction between the ways Mormons were represented on the stage in America, where they were objects of outrage and scorn, and representations on the French stage, where, despite some outlandish mischaracterizations, there is a certain bonhomie. Their primary sources range from the social theorist Hippolyte Taine, who worried that this religious experience was contributing to the erosion of Enlightenment rationalism, to Jules Verne’s Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873), which includes a brief visit to Salt Lake City. First, Cropper and Flood provide helpful background information on French perceptions of Mormonism. Readers are first treated to a well-researched introduction that situates nineteenth-century Mormonism in the context of France and the French. They bring to the plays a critical apparatus that is both targeted and judicious, a welcome contrast to editions where the critical apparatus utterly overwhelms the primary text(s). Cropper and Flood treat us to lively translations of four such musical comedies.
France’s fascination made its way to the stage in the form of vaudeville comedies, a popular nineteenth-century genre that focused on ménages à trois and farcical reversals. This practice, more than anything else, defined this upstart religion in the period. In the second half of the nineteenth century, French society was quite interested in the curious, exotic-sounding religious movement dubbed Mormonism, with a particular prurient interest in polygamy. This delightful volume brings to light a phenomenon that most of us likely had no idea existed. As odd as it seems to describe an academic book as fun, this is the first word that comes to mind in describing this work.
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