Browsing by Subject "Contemporary"

How did rock and roll, the best music for worshipping the devil, become the finest music for worshipping God? This study narrates the import of rock music into church sanctuaries across America via the rise of contemporary worship music (CWM). While white evangelicals derided rock n' roll as the "devil's music" in the 1950s, it slowly made its way into their churches and beyond over the next fifty years, emerging as a multi-million dollar industry by the twenty-first century.

This study is a cultural history of CWM, chronicling the rise of rock music in the worship life of American Christians. Pulling from several different primary and secondary sources, I argue that three main motivations fueled the rise of CWM in America: the desire to reach the lost, to commune in emotional intimacy with God, and to grow the flock. These three motivations evolved among different actors and movements at different times. In the 1970s, the Jesus People movement anchored in Southern California, adopted the music of the counterculture to attract hippies to church. In the early 1980s, the Vineyard Fellowship combined rock forms with lyrics that spoke of God in the second person in order to facilitate intimate worship with the divine. In the late 1980s, the church growth movement embraced CWM as a tool to attract disaffected baby boomers back to church. By the 1990s, these three motivations had begun to energize an entire industry built around the merger between rock and worship.

This dissertation reframes current debates over the role national culture and international connection plays in contemporary anglophone fiction in the formalist terms of genre studies. The processes and consequences of globalization continue to vex both authors who attempt to narrate them as well as those critics who attempt to make sense of the worlds those authors create. These challenges call for new rubrics from outside the matrix of nation, world, and globe, new ways of navigating the torrent of competing theories, to crystallize a path forward for the contemporary novel and its study.

The methodological strategy I propose is to turn to the narrative logics of genre fiction, which has become newly relevant after the so-called “Genre Turn” in the contemporary novel. What readers expect when they pick up a work of genre fiction is indispensable in establishing what those novels can imagine. Through readings of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2008), China Miéville’s The City & The City (2009), N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), Living in Other Places argues that the expectations that structure the historical novel, the detective novel, the blended category of science fiction and fantasy (SFF), and the emergent genre of the global novel itself provide clear, practical strategies for both conceptualizing global, international space, and navigating that space in everyday practice. These novels do so by staging an internationally hybrid history for the nation-state, pedagogically training readers into actively noticing the elements that keep nation-states together (and apart), worldbuilding new ways of imagining a whole world, and intimating the modes of interpersonal recognition called for as we experience the consequences of a globalized planet. The result is a new approach both to the study of genre and to the question of what the novel can do in articulating a shared global system.

This dissertation explores contemporary walking narratives – fictions formally organized around and guided by journeys “on foot” – in order to consider the deeply rooted literary-historical, aesthetic, and ethical relationships among practices of walking, writing, remembering, and haunting. By contemplating the ways in which contemporary authors reimagine the walking narrative as a historically embedded and physically embodied site of experimental spatial and social practices and radical modes of historical consciousness, this project encourages us to question the most obvious ways in which we encounter and represent the world. Walking narratives challenge readers and literary critics alike to reflect on the intimacies and intricacies of paths, place, pace, and point of view, thereby destabilizing familiar conceptualizations of perceptual, geographic, autobiographic, and historical knowledge. At the same time, these insistently and unsettlingly hybrid fictions also reconfigure the boundaries of genre, encouraging a theoretical and aesthetic reorientation of literary-critical knowledge guided by metaphors of spatial and temporal trespass, moments of historical surprise, recognition, and wonder, and networks of bodies in motion.

Integrating the critical-interpretive methods of literary studies with the practice-centered theories of cultural geography and performance studies, this project examines how texts by W. G. Sebald, Iain Sinclair, and Teju Cole engage with interdisciplinary questions of movement, personal identity, the philosophy of history, and place. Situating these works within the emerging critical field of “walking studies,” I argue that contemporary walking narratives become textual testing grounds for practices of wandering and wondering that (re)animate the histories embedded in landscape and allow the ghosts of the past to speak in ethically urgent ways. Through the linked practices of walking and writing, contemporary walking narratives open new routes through which to encounter literature and landscape and inspire spectral conversations designed to illuminate new points of entry into past and present, world and word.

Contemporary Religious Music is a growing subsection of the music industry in the United States. Talented artists representing a vast array of religious groups in America express their religion through popular music styles. Christian Rock, Jewish Reggae and Muslim Hip-Hop are not anomalies; rather they are indicative of a larger subculture of radio-ready religious music. This pop music has a purpose but it is not a singular purpose. This music might enhance the worship experience, provide a wholesome alternative to the unsavory choices provided by secular artists, infiltrate the mainstream culture with a positive message, raise the level of musicianship in the religious subculture or appeal to a religious audience despite origins in the secular world. It is vital to categorize contemporary religious music based on the goals of three key players - the record labels, the musicians and the audience. In this paper I use data from all three key players in addition to analysis of music and lyrics to ascertain the placement of music within my organizational system. I arrange contemporary religious music into two functional categories based on these key factors. These categories create a framework for understanding the multi-purpose world of contemporary religious music and its role within American religious communities.