Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

1085

Thomas Useted

Date

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

Major

Creative Writing

Committee Chair

Kristen Iversen

Committee Member

Sonja Livingston

Committee Member

Joseph Jones

Abstract

In this creative nonfiction manuscript, the author explores, examines, and assesses the popular music produced by Los Angeles-based musicians during the 1960s and 1970s, in an effort to understand what that music has meant to him and, by extension, what it might mean for contemporary listeners. A work of cultural criticism and memoir, this project considers the music as an outgrowth of, and at its intersections with, regional literature, film, history, myth, and landscape. The author, a native Midwesterner, uses the physical and temporal distance between his experience and the origins of the music to consider the ways in which national dreams and doubts have taken root in the place, and how the place has transformed and reflected them back. Among the themes of the manuscript are community, excess, disaster, interpretations of the American dream, and the search for personal and regional identities.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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