Tago Mago : : Permission to dream
- Submitting institution
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University of Aberdeen
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 155061412
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Bloomsbury
- ISBN
- 9781628921083
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Tago Mago was commissioned by Bloomsbury Publishing for their ‘Thirty three and a Third’ imprint on Bloomsbury Academic. The series provides writers and academics with the opportunity to reflect on a musical album. In examining the album Tago Mago, by the rock group Can, I engaged with several strands of different writing genres: pure autobiography, musical journalism, personal interviews and cultural commentary. However, I also used fiction and its destabilizing techniques. The basic structure of the book was founded on the concept of the unreliable narrator – where that narrator was myself, but fixed in an area of unknowing and ignorance which was engendered by youth, by the pre-internet-era and by geographical isolation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I only unveiled facts as they were available to me during the temporal ‘setting’ of the narrative. Rather than assuming a universal knowledge, accumulated over time – as most criticism does, from an omniscient perspective – I made use of how little I knew as a teenager: of how I struggled, and of course misinterpreted and misunderstood much of the cultural information I was exposed to. I used the novelist’s default position of creating a work of scepticism, of lack of comprehension, of how little I knew of continental Europe and its culture, of my misinterpretations of actual photographs, of my misreadings of artistic analysis. What does it mean for a teenager not to know who Fellini was, rather than to explore the nuances and references which the term Felliniesque evokes for a more knowing narrator? I wanted to create an absolutely honest text – as close as possible to what I believe was my own engagement with artistic culture in a specific historical period. In so doing, the work took on aspects of confession and of psychological unburdening.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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