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List of contents
Contributors
Introduction
Ryan Hibbett, Northern Illinois University, USA
Part 1:Authorship and Authenticity
1. David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, the Cut-Up, and Rock’s Unfinished Revolution
Barry J. Faulk, Florida State University, USA
2. Kurt, Kathleen ‘n’ Kathy: Cut-and-Paste and the Art of Being For Real
Patricia Malone, University of Aberdeen, UK
Part 2: Craft and Confession
3. Joni Mitchell and the Literature of Confession
David R. Shumway, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
4. Pop Star vs. Harvard Professor: The “Amateur” Poetry of Taylor Swift
Weishun Lu, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
5. Personae Non Grata: Dramatic Monologue and Social Pathology in Select Randy Newman Songs
John Kimsey, DePaul University, USA
Part 3: Aesthetics, Movements, Technology
6. New Wave, European Avant-Gardes, and the Unmaking of Rock Music
Chris Mustazza, University of Pennsylvania, USA
7. Cycling on Acid: The Literariness of Altered Experiences in Psychedelic Rock
Tymon Adamczewski, Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz, Poland
Part 4: Signs and Mediations
8. A Portrait of the Artist in a Pop Song: Images of James Joyce in Popular Music
Kevin Farrell, Radford University, USA
9. “Hand in Glove”: Punk, Post-punk, and Poetry
Martin Malone, University of Aberdeen, UK
Part 5: Nation and Narrative
10. Under an American Spell: U2’s The Joshua Tree in the Shadow of Flannery O’Connor
Scott Calhoun, Cedarville University, USA
11. Rock, Hard-Boiled: The Mekons and American Crime Fiction
Peter Hesseldenz, University of Kentucky, USA
12. When Poetry Meets Popular Music: The Case of Polish Rock Artists in the Late Twentieth Century
Marek Jezinski, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland
Part 6: Identity and Discourse
13. “It’s our version of Almost Famous”: Towards a Reimagined Canon of Rock Criticism
Kimberly Mack, University of Toledo, USA
14. Limits of the Literary: Rethinking Allusions in Pop Music
Pat O’Grady, Independent Scholar, Australia
Acknowledgments
Index
About the author
Ryan Hibbett is an Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University, USA, whose research examines the high art/pop culture relation in literature and music alike. He is the author of Philip Larkin, Popular Culture, and the English Individual (2019), and his articles have appeared in Cambridge Quarterly, Popular Music and Society, Twentieth-Century Literature, Contemporary Literature, and Journal of Popular Music Studies.
Summary
Just as soon as it had got rolling, rock music had a problem: it wanted to be art. A mere four years separate the Beatles as mere kiddy culture from the artful geniuses of Sergeant Pepper’s, meaning the very same band who represents the mass-consumed, "mindless" music of adolescents simultaneously enjoys status as among the best that Western culture has to offer. The story of rock music, it turns out, is less that of a contagious popular form situated in opposition to high art, but, rather, a story of high and low in dialogue--messy and contentious, to be sure, but also mutually obligated to account for, if not appropriate, one another. The chapters in this book track the uses of literature, specifically, within this relation, helping to showcase collectively its fundamental role in the emergence of the "pop omnivore."
Foreword
Discusses the relationship between popular music and literature in conjunction with the connection between high and low art.
Additional text
With Lit-Rock, Ryan Hibbett and his rich stable of contributors make a compelling case for the vital and ongoing role of literary art in popular music. Moving well beyond the tired debates over whether rock lyrics are poetry, the essays here bring nuance and new insight into the complicated pas de deux of lit and rock that has too often been figured as flowing in one direction only, rock riding on literature’s coattails. Hibbett’s opening essay is a marvel: wide ranging, erudite—a revelation.
