Chapter 10 of Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: “Emocosms: Mind-Forg’d Realities in Emo(tional) Rock Music” (pp. 183-197) by Eike Träger, Ph.D. candidate, University of Cologne, Köln, Germany.
- Chapter summary
- Romantic artists at times exploit dark moods for artistic purposes. Eike Träger’s “The World Is Mine: Pathetic Fallacy and Mind-Forg’d Realities in Emo(tional) Rock Music” identifies the pathetic fallacy and heterocosm as two points of affinity between English Romanticism and emo music. Relying on Sayre’s and Löwy’s “Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity,” Träger sees in emo “a Weltschmerz that literally creates a cosmos of pain in lyrical form” in the music of bands such as The Danburrys, the Deftones, AFI, and La Dispute. Setting up and then dismantling Ruskin’s theory of art as means of explaining emo music, he ultimately argues that emo bands are aligned with “resigned” Romanticism in Sayre’s and Löwy’s taxonomy: emo music is a form of Romanticism in its emphasis on affect and the individual, but because it is distinctly apolitical, it differs from both first and second generation English Romantics.
- Music
- The Danburrys, “Emo’s Just Another Name For Romanticism”
- My Chemical Romance, “Our Lady of Sorrows”
- All Time Low, “Kids in the Dark”
- The Used, “Bulimic”
- Silverchair, “Miss You Love”
- Dashboard Confessional, “Screaming Infidelities”
- AFI, “Miseria Cantare (The Beginning)”
- Finch, “What It Is to Burn”
- AFI, “Death of Seasons”
- La Dispute, “Hudsonville, MI 1956”
- Literature
- William Wordsworth
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- John Keats, “O Solitude! If I Must With Thee Dwell”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
- John Ruskin, Modern Painters III
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- William Blake
- Byron
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