Kenneth Womack - Editor
Todd F. Davis - Editor
SUMMARY
Addresses the band’s resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music.
Despite the enormous amount of writing devoted to the Beatles during the last few decades, the band’s abiding intellectual and cultural significance has received scant attention. Using various modes of literary, musicological, and cultural criticism, the essays in Reading the Beatles firmly establish the Beatles as a locus of serious academic and cultural study. Exploring the group’s resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music, the contributors trace not only the literary and musicological qualities of selected Beatles songs but also the development of the Beatles’ artistry in their films and the ways in which the band has functioned as a cultural, historical, and economic product. In a poignant afterword, Jane Tompkins offers an autobiographical account of the ways in which the Beatles afforded her with the self-actualizing means to become less alienated from popular culture, gender expectations, and even herself during the early 1960s.
“This book addresses many of the most significant aspects of the Beatles—their music and their social and cultural influence and contexts. It finds a balance between specialist knowledge (i.e., musicology) and more general interest, and it covers the full breadth of the Beatles’ output. The Beatles effected a significant and irreversible epoch in popular music, and for this reason deserve a sound academic study of the many aspects of their arrival, their dominance, their challenges, and their legacy. Such a study is provided here in a diverse and inventive collection of engaging essays.” — Julian Wolfreys, author of Occasional Deconstructions
“The variety of approaches and issues in this book provides a useful survey of the possibilities of academic approaches to popular music in general, while remaining accessible to music fans. The book is not hagiography; there is an interesting trajectory, from positive appraisals of the Beatles’ practices in their heyday to more negative assessments of recent efforts to construct their legacy.” — Neil Nehring, author of Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger Is an Energy
Contributors include John Covach, Todd F. Davis, James M. Decker, Walter Everett, Paul Gleed, John Kimsey, Ian Marshall, Kevin McCarron, William M. Northcutt, Russell Reising, Jeffrey Roessner, Jane Tompkins, Sheila Whiteley, and Kenneth Womack.
At The Pennsylvania State University at Altoona, Kenneth Womack is Associate Professor of English and Todd F. Davis is Assistant Professor of English. Together they authored The Critical Response to John Irving and Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory, and edited Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Davis is also the author of Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade; or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism, also published by SUNY Press.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Dear Sir or Madam, Will You Read My Book?”
Kenneth Womack and Todd F. Davis
Part I
“Speaking words of wisdom”: The Beatles’ Poetics
1. “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together”: Bakhtin and the Beatles
Ian Marshall
2. From “Craft” to “Art”: Formal Structure in the Music of the Beatles
John Covach
3. “Love, love, love”: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Selected Songs by the Beatles
Sheila Whiteley
4. Painting Their Room in a Colorful Way: The Beatles Exploration of Timbre
Walter Everett
Part II
“A splendid time is guaranteed for all”: Theorizing the Beatles
5. Mythology, Remythology, and Demythology: The Beatles on Film
Kenneth Womack and Todd F. Davis
6. Vacio Luminoso: “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the Coherence of the Impossible
Russell Reising
7. The Spectacle of Alienation: Death, Loss, and the Crowd in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
William M. Northcutt
8. We All Want to Change the World: Postmodern Politics and the Beatles’ White Album
Jeffrey Roessner
Part III
“We can work it out”: The Beatles and Culture
9. “The rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry”: The Beatles and Questions of Mass and High Culture
Paul Gleed
10. A Universal Childhood: Tourism, Pilgrimage, and the Beatles
Kevin McCarron
11. “Baby, You’re a Rich Man”: The Beatles, Ideology, and the Cultural Moment
James M. Decker
12. Spinning the Historical Record: Lennon, McCartney, and Museum Politics
John Kimsey
Afterword: I Want to Hold Your Hand
Jane Tompkins
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61247
