Sonic Retro-Futures: Musical Nostalgia as Revolution in Post-1960s American Literature, Film

241 Pages·2015·2.75 MB·English

UC Riverside
UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Sonic Retro-Futures: Musical Nostalgia as Revolution in Post-1960s American Literature, Film
and Technoculture
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65f2825x
Author
Young, Mark Thomas
Publication Date
2015

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
RIVERSIDE

Sonic Retro-Futures: Musical Nostalgia as Revolution in Post-1960s American
Literature, Film and Technoculture

A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

English

by

Mark Thomas Young

June 2015

Dissertation Committee:
Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson
Dr. Steven Gould Axelrod
Dr. Tom Lutz
Copyright by
Mark Thomas Young
2015
The Dissertation of Mark Thomas Young is approved:

Committee Chairperson

University of California, Riverside
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As there are many midwives to an “individual” success, I’d like to thank the
various mentors, colleagues, organizations, friends, and family members who have
supported me through the stages of conception, drafting, revision, and completion of this
project.
Perhaps the most important influences on my early thinking about this topic came
from Paweł Frelik and Larry McCaffery, with whom I shared a rousing desert hike in the
foothills of Borrego Springs. After an evening of food, drink, and lively exchange, I had
the long-overdue epiphany to channel my training in musical performance more directly
into my academic pursuits. The early support, friendship, and collegiality of these two
had a tremendously positive effect on the arc of my scholarship; knowing they believed
in the project helped me pencil its first sketchy contours—and ultimately see it through to
the end.
Susan Zieger also played an important role in helping me shape the project’s
focus; the professionalism with which she comported herself in response to a graduate
student’s “epiphany in the desert” emails was matchless, if not entirely devoid of
amusement. Her early advice about the scope, focus, and testing areas necessary to
prepare for the task proved extremely valuable.
I owe a similar debt of gratitude to James Tobias for his help in compiling a sound
studies reading list during the pre-dissertation phase; our weekly dialogues in preparation
for the qualifying exams formed a solid theoretical foundation for my research and
helped me find my own contribution to ongoing scholarly debates. At a time, too, when I
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was too poor to get one of my own, he was generous enough to let me borrow his iPad, so
I could study Björk’s recent interactive “app-album,” Biophilia. Small gestures of
kindness such as this are part of what great mentorship is all about, and as I step into my
own full-time role as an educator, I hope to emulate his example and give a hand up,
whenever possible, to those in need.
It almost goes without saying, but I’d be remiss not to mention how much of a joy
my dissertation committee was to work with. Their unflagging support and intellectual
rigor (not to mention their willingness to plant a boot in the “pitoot”) simply made me a
better scholar than I was before I began this dissertation. Chief among the committee
members, but not officially credited due to administrative circumstances, Rob Latham
deserves fanfare for his guidance and mentorship at every stage of this work; in one way
or another, his influence touches every page of the manuscript, and I thank him for all his
hard work and belief in my ideas.
All writers need great editors and critics to bring out their very best. At UCR,
many colleagues volunteered precious time to read chapter drafts and offer constructive,
and/or lovingly destructive, feedback. The sharp eyes and wits of Alan Lovegreen, Jerry
Winter, Jeffrey Hicks, Matthew Bond, Richard Hunt and Annie Schnarr all helped
improve the chapters herein, and I truly appreciate their contributions.
Dissertations by anyone—let alone first-generation college students—don’t get
written without the material support to fund travel and archival research, or to simply
stave off the many bouts of financial precarity (i.e., poverty) that distract from the
highest-level demands of intellectual labor. So I’d like to thank the following people,
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institutions, and organizations for investing in my project through generous grants and
fellowships at various stages of its completion. A workshop grant from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, awarded through UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society (CIS), allowed
me to design a first-of-its-kind public Science Fiction and Sound Studies colloquium with
the funds to draw renowned SF scholar, Istvan Csicsery-ronay, Jr. The CIS also awarded
me a Graduate Student Research Grant to facilitate travel to Yale University’s Beinecke
Library, where I performed archival research for Chapter 1 in the James Wheldon
Johnson Collection, in which Langston Hughes’s complete drafts and notes for Ask Your
Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz reside. I also offer sincere thanks to the Barricelli family and
UCR’s department of Comparative Literature for awarding me the generous Barricelli
Award; it’s funds allowed me to purchase an iPad of my own, as well as a range of
innovative music-production apps that directly improved my arguments about
contemporary technoculture in the dissertation’s concluding Coda section. Thanks, too,
go out to the editorial board of Science Fiction Studies, who selected my project for the
R.D. Mullen Fellowship, which allowed me to partially forgo summer employment and
perform archival research in UCR’s Eaton Collection, investigating the connections
between pulp magazine stories in the Fifties and Sixties and the emerging musical
technocultures of the time.
The subject of retro music tends to activate everyone’s antennae on one
wavelength or another, and over the years I’ve been grateful to the many people who’ve
shared their experience, opinions, suggestions, and kind words on the subject. Amongst
the academic set, I thank Rich Calvin, Brian Attebery, Istvan Csicsery-ronay, Jr., Nalo
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Hopkinson, Sydney Brown, Bill Nericcio, Jerry Farber, Art Evans, Carol McGuirk, Rita
Raley, Lysa Rivera, and Grace Dillon, among others, including Giulia Hoffmann, who
deserves mention for being so darned nice. Amongst the music makers and dreamers of
dreams, I thank Sam Boukas, Robert Netcoh, Jr., Kevin Fuller, Brian Murray, Kris
Wardwell, “Shirtless” Steve Andersen, Dan Deaton, Rose Puntillo, Justin Kaput, John
Flood, and Jason Chaney. Their creative input, expertise, and/or friendship has made a
lasting impact on my both my life and work.
To my family, I offer enormous thanks for their patience, good humor, and
encouragement. I couldn’t have done this without them.
Finally, I thank the “fair use” protections of the U.S. copyright code, section 107;
all images contained within this dissertation are in the public domain and used solely for
the purpose of scholarly research.

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ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Sonic Retro-Futures: Musical Nostalgia as Revolution in Post-1960s American
Literature, Film and Technoculture

by

Mark Thomas Young

Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English
University of California, Riverside, June 2015
Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson

This dissertation examines the ongoing influence of retro music cultures on post-
1960s American artists and their representations of social, political, and economic
change. Through a roughly decade-by-decade analysis of poetry, novels, film, and
emerging technocultures, I make the case for a pendular dynamic of nostalgic art in the
wake of the Civil Rights era—namely, a hope for revolutionary futures based on the past
coupled with a backward-looking dirge for a Rubicon crossed, a moment of potential
irretrievably lost. These twinned poles of optimism and pessimism share a nostalgic
center in the music cultures of the past, emblematized in American art as agents of
change and revolution, high water marks against which artists measure progressivism or
cultural regression.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Audio-Didactic Postmodernism: Langston Hughes’s
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz 21

Chapter Two: SF’s Degenerative Nostalgia in the MTV Era 60

Chapter Three: Faces of Orpheus in Twenty-first Century American Literature 113

Chapter Four: Xenochrony: Aural Media and Neoliberal Time in
Shane Carruth’s Primer 164

Coda: Digital Aurality and the Science Fictional Public Sphere 201

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