This book proposes that new music technologies attract unconscious desires for socialism and collectivity, enabling millions of people living under capitalism to dream of repressed social alternatives.
David P. Rando is Associate Professor of English at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA. He is the author of Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century, as well as articles on modernist and contemporary fiction.
Preface.- Introduction: Audible Hope.- Chapter 1: Wish Images and Wishful Images in Benjamin and Bloch.- Chapter 2: The Music of Wish Images: Filesharing and Utopia.- Chapter 3: The Mixtape as Wishtape: Heterotopia, Translation, and Nostalgia.- Chapter 4: The Artist and Technology: William Gaddis’s Agapē Agape, or the World’s Smallest Player Piano Playing Itself Just for You.- Chapter 5: ‘The Enemy Has Never Ceased to Be Victorious’: Anne Frank and Neutral Milk Hotel.- Chapter 6: Technology, Everyday Life, and Hope.- Conclusion: The Happy Appearance and the Wishful Tendency in Cultural Criticism.