Graduation Year
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.L.A.
Degree Name
Master of Liberal Arts (M.L.A.)
Degree Granting Department
Humanities and Cultural Studies
Major Professor
Andrew Berish, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Amy Rust, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Daniel Belgrad, Ph.D.
Keywords
country music, utopia, authenticity, community, country musical, Pure Country
Abstract
Many consider music, songs, and dance performance as utopian signifiers for cinema, but few has entered the utopian discourse of country musicals, a small genre of cinema usually known as country music films. By closely scrutinizing Pure Country (1992), this thesis aims to reveal how country music—as music numbers and as background cues— integrate and connect the fragmented on-screen world for the country musicals so as to offer audiences a fullness of utopian experience, and how this utopian effect are culturally significant for American audiences due to country music’s unique mechanism of constructing utopia and nostalgia in its past-orientations, sentimentalities, and alleged authenticities. I argue because of the American country music’s internal need for utopia as an individual and social agent, Pure Country, as well as the neo-traditionalism country music defined by Pure Country, reconciles the pop and the old time country music, and also conciliates the tension expressed in such music tastes between the rural and urban communities. This reconciliation makes Pure Country a not so perfect cinematic text for documenting country music’s authenticity and origin, but fully and clearly reflects the utopian meaning of country music on an individual and social level.
Scholar Commons Citation
Ma, Siyuan, "To Utopianize the Mundane: Sound and Image in Country Musicals" (2016). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/6112
