Date of Award

Summer 2024

Language

English

Embargo Period

7-17-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Program

English

First Advisor

Dr. Ed Schwarzschild

Committee Members

Dr. James Lilley, Lynne Tillman

Keywords

cult, cultic milieu, conspiracy theory, radicalization, extremism, romanticism

Subject Categories

American Politics | Fiction | Folklore | Literature in English, North America | Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance | Sociology of Culture | Sociology of Religion | Theory and Philosophy | United States History

Abstract

A response to recent cultural trends of radicalization, extremism, and violence in American society, this dissertation, a novel rendered in ephemeral fragments of oral histories, interrogates the romanticist postures that compel a community of musical artists, the so-called “Folk Revival Revival,” toward infamy and tragedy. Where more traditional sociological approaches to cultic formations stress the importance of centralized charismatic authority, and more traditional psychological approaches rely upon a conspiratorial Cold War ethos of cognitive bias and coercive control (i.e. “brainwashing”), this project meets such assumptions with incredulity, asserting instead that cultic and conspiratorial entrancement awakens first from within, and may be best understood as a misguided narrative expression of romantic genius, where the transcendent subjectivity of the individual transgresses against established standards of empirical truth as defined by the modern space, and is legitimized more by the discursive style of its rebellion than the aggregation of alternative systems of knowledge or social order.

License

This work is licensed under the University at Albany Standard Author Agreement.

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