How Does It Feel?: Rationality and Affectivity in the Birth and Early Development of Rock and Roll
Item
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Title
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How Does It Feel?: Rationality and Affectivity in the Birth and Early Development of Rock and Roll
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:37a33ae9b246:12061
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identifier
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12391
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Creator
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Maxwell, Grant,
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Contributor
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Marc Dolan
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American studies | Biographies | Philosophy | Beatles | Bergson | Dylan | Elvis | James | Whitehead
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Abstract
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Through chapters on Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan, this dissertation examines the hypothesis that the music and culture of rock and roll have mediated a return of intuitive, affective, and somatic epistemological modes discursively repressed in modernity. Employing a theoretical perspective derived from thinkers such as Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, William James, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead, it shows how perhaps the preeminent musical genre of the mid-twentieth century enacted a dialectical return to archaic modes of experience as a complement to the privileging of rationalism and materialism since the Enlightenment. At the genre's inception in the mid-nineteen fifties, Elvis Presley participated in one prominent performative inflection of the intimate reintegration of the privileging polarity of rationality over affect that had come to pervade predominant cultural streams in the West over the preceding centuries, exemplified in the Cartesian cogito , the explicit equation of thought with human being in general. Subsequently, the Beatles and Bob Dylan brought this integration to a climax, the Beatles in the more external, social mode of the band, and Dylan in the more internal, introspective mode of the individual singer-songwriter. Along with many other artists, Presley, the Beatles, and Dylan performed a fundamental transformation of culture whose implications still largely condition our aesthetic and psychological experience in the early twenty-first century.;Most texts about these three artists (and there are many) are either simple biographical narratives or analyses of music and lyrics, so a similar project would be largely redundant. By contrast, employing the methods of literary criticism, this dissertation primarily explicates the rhetorical nuances of the written and oral narratives about these figures, which obliquely trace a philosophy of rock and roll. That is, rock and roll appears to be both catalyst and expression of a deep and relatively sudden epistemological shift initiated on a mass scale in the mid-twentieth century. Although this shift was presaged by the confluence of many factors---musical, cultural, aesthetic, political, and economic---these elements seem never to have been fully synthesized until the emergence of rock and roll, never fully realized in a single lineage (among other lineages in other media) until Dylan, the Beatles, and others produced complementary syntheses of the mode Presley and his milieu had initiated with numerous other artistic and intellectual movements.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
