In 1913, RJ Reynolds stunned competitors in the tobacco market by introducing the pre-rolled cigarette. Until then it was believed that people’s practice of rolling their own cigarettes was so simple and ritualized that innovation could hardly yield a profit. Yet few other inventions have come to dominate the twentieth century on so many sensory planes.

It has to be recognized that market forces are comprised of producers trying to sell something, and consumers wanting to buy it. This creates fertile ground for the researcher as there are theoretical concepts to be utilized on all sides of the equation. In my research paper, I intend to consider the following approaches:

– Psychoanalytic: Camel and Marlboro have been criticized for various reasons in their advertising campaigns. The first for inappropriate sexual imagery, the second for an unrealistic depiction of the smoker’s lifestyle, tragically embodied by the real-life story of the “Marlboro man.” Additionally, what can psychoanalysis say about the smoker himself? Freud agonized over his own cigar smoking, which he sensed had a traumatic experienced attached to it that he never successfully isolated.

– Marxist: the proliferation of cigarette brands and marketing campaigns would be regarded critically by theorists like Adorno, who would point to the pseudoindividualistic aspect of brand selection based on imaginary attributes.

– Althusserian: this perspective covers both the smoker’s addiction, and his relationship to advertisement. As a former smoker, I know that much of one’s lifestyle consists of creating ideologies in which smoking is a natural, harmonious facet of one’s personality. How much does advertisement infiltrate this ideological process?

– Cultural studies: how do smokers regard their own activity? Interviews with people outside dining halls and the library are perfect sites of study. I also plan to examine how paratexts, like Still Life With Woodpecker, use Camel cigarettes as a literary image. To what extent is pleasure missing from the smoking discourse?

– Queer theory: how has cigarette marketing drawn the lines between the masculine and the feminine in our culture? Virginia Slims vs. Marlboro Reds.

Tentative thesis: as an addictive, unhealthy, and controversial biological process, cigarette smoking triggers defense mechanisms in consumers who struggle to reconcile their behavior with various deterrents. This struggle provides ground for exploitation by all market forces – consumers, producers, social groups, and researchers.

Texts

– Brandt, Allan. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

– Robbins, Tom. Still Life With Woodpecker. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.

– Kluger, Richard. Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

I will probably come across other sources either in the course of reading the above, or in conversations with people whose advice I might ask while working on this assignment. I might also take a few trips to the library and see what other goodies they have.