Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Trapani, William

Abstract

This thesis builds from press accounts of Bruce Springsteen’s South by Southwest keynote address, taken by many to be a renewed call to arms of the classic mantras of the rock ethos in the age of a declining recording industry. In tracing the ways the speech circulated I argue that its discourse was rearticulated toward quite different (and concerning) ends. Throughout, I aim to show the apparatuses of power that sustains the rock liberation fantasy. I read the coverage of Springsteen’s address as a therapeutic discourse meant to soothe the anxiety over the closure of agency in the age of neoliberalism. The general problematic for the thesis, then, addresses an anxiety over the collapse of freedom and as such works to offer broad reflections on the nature of radical agency in our increasingly neoliberal present.

Extent

93 p.

Comments

Includes bibliography.|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Includes bibliography.

Identifier

FA00004945

Format

pdf

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