Living Genres in Late Modernity rehears the American 1970s through the workings of its musical genres. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as unstable constellations of works, people, practices, institutions, technologies, money, conventions, forms, ideas, and multisensory experiences. What these genres share is a significant cultural moment: they arrive just after “the sixties” and are haunted by a sense of belatedness, loss, or doubt, even as they embrace narratives of progress or abundance. These genres give us reasons—and means—to examine our culture’s self-understandings. Through close readings and large-scale mappings of cultural and stylistic patterns, the book’s five linked studies reveal how genres help construct personal and cultural identities that are both partial and overlapping, that exist in tension with one another, and that we experience in ebbs and flows.
Adrian Daub Book order






- 2022
- 2021
The Dynastic Imagination
- 256 pages
- 9 hours of reading
Adrian Daub’s The Dynastic Imagination offers an unexpected account of modern German intellectual history through frameworks of family and kinship. Modernity aimed to brush off dynastic, hierarchical authority and to make society anew through the mechanisms of marriage, siblinghood, and love. It was, in other words, centered on the nuclear family. But as Daub shows, the dynastic imagination persisted, in time emerging as a critical stance by which the nuclear family’s conservatism and temporal limits could be exposed. Focusing on the complex interaction between dynasties and national identity-formation in Germany, Daub shows how a lingering preoccupation with dynastic modes of explanation, legitimation, and organization suffused German literature and culture.Daub builds this conception of dynasty in a syncretic study of the literature, sciences, and history of ideas into the twentieth century. As early modernism discovered a standpoint from which to critique the nuclear family, remnants of dynastic ideology kept their hold variously on Richard Wagner, Émile Zola, Stefan George, and Sigmund Freud. At every stage of cultural progression, Daub reveals how the relation of dynastic to nuclear families inflected modern intellectual history.
- 2020
What Tech Calls Thinking
- 160 pages
- 6 hours of reading
From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins--
- 2018
The Doctor Faustus Dossier - Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and their Contemporaries, 1930-1951
- 375 pages
- 14 hours of reading
This complete edition of letters and documents between Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann brings together two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both of whom found refuge in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. Culminating in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, the correspondence, diary entries, and related articles provide a glimpse inside the private and public lives of these two great artists, the outstanding figures of the German-exile community in California. In the thicket of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make enemies of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters in this essential volume are complemented by rich primary source materials and an introduction by Germanic scholar Adrian Daub that contextualizes the impact the artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.
- 2015
The James Bond Songs
- 242 pages
- 9 hours of reading
You know the name. You know the number. And, strangely enough, you recognize the songs. The James Bond-songs have been a fixture of our musical landscape for over fifty years, a distinct genre we've sometimes admired, sometimes smirked at. This book delves into these songs, tracing a secret history of pop and of ourselves as listeners.
- 2014
Four-handed monsters
- 246 pages
- 9 hours of reading
Four-Handed Monsters surveys the cultural perception of four-hand piano playing in the nineteenth century. As the piano became a central institution of the bourgeois household and as piano transcriptions created a stable canon of classic works, four-hand playing became a ubiquitous and structurally important buttress of domestic life, provoking reflections in the literature, philosophy, journalism and the visual arts of the age.
- 2012
Uncivil unions
- 366 pages
- 13 hours of reading
Discusses the Idealist and Romantic poets and philosophers in Germany in the early 19th century, who thought about marriage differently from their Enlightenment predecessors.