Popular culture--United States--History--20th century.

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.

The Celestine Prophecy is a popular new age novel which has attracted an audience numbering in the millions. Looking at this book from both the political and cultural economic perspectives allows us to analyze economic factors behind the book's production, the text itself, and the ways the audience uses the text. From these perspectives we can see what produced this cultural phenomenon, and examine alternative meanings that readers of the text may find in it. Issues of hegemony, diversity and domination are explored, as is the "structure of feeling" of the text. How the audience uses or resists the ideas incorporated in the novel is also studied.