Macleod, Lewis
"Learning to Be Mad, In a Dream": The Cold War and the Birth of the Beat Generation
The Beat Generation shaped, and was shaped by, the post-WWII containment culture that arose in 1950s America. This so-called cultural containment reflected the social, political, and economic factors that were unique to the post-WWII period and are often
considered concurrent to post-war McCarthyism, which promoted a national ideology of exclusionism that was foremost opposed to the threat of Communism. I propose in my thesis that containment was a major influence in the rhetoric of resistance that is found
within the most prominent works of the Generation. My thesis also looks at the how Beat literature shifted from the counterculture to the mainstream and the impact that celebrity had on the Generation. When the Beats achieved literary fame their counterculture
represented the forefront of the New Left and was synonymous with succeeding protest cultures of the 1960s.
Author Keywords: Beat Generation, Cold War, Containment Culture, McCarthyism, Postmodernism, Second Wave Feminism
The Songs We Share (and the Records We Steal): Popular Music and Shoplifting in an Age of Digital Piracy
This thesis explores the rhetoric of theft imposed on online music by comparing file
sharing to shoplifting. Since the litigation between the music industry and Napster, file sharing has been perceived, both by the entertainment industry and by a music listening public, as a criminal act. However, file sharing has more in common with home taping and music archives than it does with music shoplifting. It differs from theft in terms of law, motivation and publicness. In reviewing three histories -- a history of petty theft, a history of policing online music, and a history of shoplifting narratives in popular music culture -- the implications for the cultural production of popular music and popular music identity become apparent. In the end, file sharing links itself more to parody and the concept of fairness than it does to youth rebellion and therefore is unsuitable for sustaining a traditional music industry and the values it has formed with its public.
Author Keywords: copyright, cultural production, file sharing, mp3, popular music, shoplifting