This concluding chapter offers some reflections on the nature of nihilism in the works explored. An overview is given of the different versions of the problem of nihilism that the thinkers and writers examined here have sketched. This is followed by another comparative overview of their different proposals for solutions to nihilism. A section is also dedicated to showing the many ways in which the thinkers of the nineteenth century anticipated key elements of twentieth-century existentialism. Among the elements discussed are the realization of the nothingness, authenticity, existential freedom, rebellion, the existentialist hero, and the absurd. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the relevance of nihilism in the twenty-first century.

With their Billboard chart-topping albums and sold-out stadium concerts around the globe, BTS today is the biggest success story of international K-pop. The unprecedented success of BTS challenges the understanding and study of K-pop, as it simultaneously reinforces previously existing perspectives while demanding several new ones. This chapter traces the career of BTS, surveying the historical implications of their rise to the dramatic change in the landscape of music consumption in the era of new media. Rather than depending on music industry insiders or media gatekeepers, the pop stars of the internet era form a strong and direct connection with their fans. ARMY, BTS’s global fandom, is emblematic of this change. ARMY fans do not merely buy albums or generate publicity for their stars; they open new fronts in the discourse and creative derivative work centered around BTS, further fueling the group’s worldwide success. In the US mainstream pop music market dominated by US and UK acts, these shifts in defining BTS’s success demand reconsideration of the future possibilities of Asian stars.

Adam Kelly has persuasively argued that Wallace’s oeuvre should be understood through the prism of New Sincerity, which is to say a late- or post-postmodernist quest to balance cynicism with a return to what Wallace called “single-entendre principles.” While the new sincerity paradigm is not without its critics, sincerity is indisputably central to Wallace’s ethical system, and its personal and authorial challenges provide some of the most compelling moments in his writing. The apparent sincerity of his authorial voice has been one of his most appealing attributes, and Wallace himself commented frequently on the fraught dynamic between author and reader, simultaneously predicated on sincerity and manipulation. This chapter traces the role of sincerity as, on the one hand, a sort of artistic telos for Wallace and, on the other, an endlessly thorny problem that springs up in every facet of contemporary life. The chapter goes on to highlight Wallace’s influence in contemporary fiction, highlighting Karl Ove Knausgaard as an author who explores similar questions.

Though lauded as radically generically innovative, David Foster Wallace’s work – both in characteristics and range – has a number of antecedents in nineteenth-century Anglophone and other traditions, which ultimately illuminate the relationship between the two main hallmarks of his work: ethical gesture and stylistic complexity. As his reviews and comments on other authors and cultural trends make clear, Wallace was both a debunker of grand claims (in the manner of the Melville who said Emerson gave the impression that “had he lived in those days in which the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions”) and a maker of such claims himself. He was obviously deeply indebted to – and may even have represented a baroque final development of – a consistent nineteenth-century American emphasis (strengthened through the movement for the abolition of slavery) on sympathetic identification as a primary social resource. Wallace combines nineteenth-century literary figures’ blend of the essayistic with the fundamental trajectory of the bildungsroman, within fiction and nonfiction. Through an analysis of Wallace’s forebears and influences, focusing on the American nineteenth century, this chapter proposes that Wallace in fact played the role of a nineteenth-century novelist (at once cultural commentator and artist) in a postmodern context. While Wallace’s ethics always seems starkly accessible, his brand of literariness does not. This is because he brings two central animating features of nineteenth-century American writing’s interventions to their most acute, impossible point: Sympathy becomes incapacitating dissolution, and educative realism approaches unreadability. Understanding this background also provides a new context for the recent diminution of Wallace’s personal reputation: His ethical appeals are not only a hypocritical contrast to private conduct but also an indispensable strategy for a formal obscurity that still sought transformative relevance.

Who is permitted to participate in and how they participate are critical issues within the cultural and social context of country music. On the surface, the issues appear to be driven by the economics of record production—industry players study their markets and choose product strategies that meet the demands and needs of the consumer at a cost that maintains an acceptable profit margin for everyone involved. But as Whose Country Music? demonstrates, individuals and institutions within the field of country music cultural production act as gatekeepers on the sound and identity of the genre, dictating not just who gets to participate but also the terms under which they are permitted to contribute to country music culture. The introductory chapter describes the various ways in which gatekeepers control access to opportunities and resources within country music culture, pointing to chapters within the collection to show the industrial system functions.

In 2018, Lauren Alaina released her single “Ladies in the ’90s,” which takes a nostalgic look at her childhood through cleverly chosen lyrics from chart-topping songs of the 1990s. “Ladies in the ’90s” references women—and only women—from country music, as well as pop, rock, and R&B. The song establishes Lauren Alaina’s broad musical lineage and evokes nostalgia for an earlier decade. This chapter explores the performative and affective use of nostalgia and lineage in country music. A close reading of “Ladies in the ’90s” reveals how the generation of country artists coming of age in the second decade of the twenty-first century are redefining and expanding the stylistic, cultural, and even racial boundaries of the genre through the nostalgic tropes that have been used for decades in country music. In so doing, artists like Lauren Alaina are challenging the industry and carving out new musical and narrative spaces.

In the past decade, interest in the work of the tailor Nudie Cohn has intensified and the style he created, which was the defining dress practice of country music performance throughout the 1950s, has been reinterpreted by emerging western wear designers. This style juxtaposes the materials and construction values of bespoke tailoring with jewel colors, pictorial embroidery, sparkling rhinestones, and the style of the American West. Its revival began among musicians identified with the alt.country or Americana movements and has since broadened to mainstream country (Midland), to artists outside the genre (Lily Allen), and on its contested margins (Lil Nas X). This chapter explores the current revival as a development of and extension beyond the Nudie style’s established role as a signifier of authenticity, discussing its ability to reflect and to forge gender and race identities in country music, both historically and in the present.

This chapter argues that Langston Hughes’s 1930s red poetry posits a proletarian-internationalist notion of authenticity, one that attempts to close the cognitive gap between lived reality, on the one hand, and the latter’s spatial, temporal, and structural determinations, on the other. The chapter maintains that two dominant poetics articulate this authenticity, namely, the Communist Sublime and the Antifascist Grotesque. Although each poetics corresponds to a specific set of concerns of the contemporaneous Communist-led Left, both endeavor to unite a fragmented global proletariat using various thematic and formal strategies. Viewed as heuristics allowing us to link Hughes’s radical poetry to the context of Great Depression–era Communism, the Communist Sublime and the Antifascist Grotesque refute the misconception that authenticity was an exclusive feature of the poet’s Black-vernacular work. They also unveil the hopes and fears that defined Hughes’s literary imagination as the possibility of proletarian revolution gave way to war and Fascism.

This chapter discusses Heidegger’s concept of authenticity and the extent to which it entails an individualism incompatible with his social ontological holism. I argue that Heidegger’s notion of authenticity does not refer to a process of individualisation in which individuals come to rely mostly or solely on their own abilities. Rather, it amounts to what I call an emphatic individuation in which Dasein ontically comes to understand its own nature. Rather than prescribing a set of beliefs or actions, I argue that authenticity requires Dasein to adopt a set of ontologically transparent second-order attitudes on its own existence. This solves two problems inherent to Heidegger’s conception of the self, namely, its lack of constancy (the capacity of the self to remain itself in changing situations) and autonomy (the capacity to commit to some possibilities rather than others). These problems are solved by the analysis of being-towards-death and conscience, respectively. I then consider what the demand for authenticity entails for Heidegger’s conception of face-to-face relations and his conception of historical communities and how it differs from moral obligations.

I outline the theories of temporal awareness and existential temporality that Merleau-Ponty gets from Husserl and Heidegger and qualifies with his account of body temporality. This constitutes an efficacious past that inhabits the present without ever having been present to consciousness. I then set out his stories about the tacit and spoken cogito and about the concrete subject or person. I consider objections to the effect that his account of the embodied subject seems to cast it as an unceasing project of acquisitive appropriation, and that his view of the body is an idealisation from an ageist and ableist perspective. My response is that his story about appropriation is qualified for the most part, and that his theory can be reworked to escape the charges of idealisation, ageism and ableism. I conclude by suggesting that his notion of radical reflection brings out how phenomenology is of its essence revisable and its futures unforeseeable.

This chapter returns to a long-standing issue in in language and identity research based on life story interviews - the need for theoretical and methodological rigour (Pavlenko, 2007). It begins with background: first a brief discussion of identity that highlights those aspects of the construct that later come to the fore, and second, presentation of a version of positioning theory (PT) recently developed by the author (Block, 2017). This version draws on the original PT model developed by Rom Harré and his associates but importantly, it expands on this model with the addition of constructs taken from sociolinguistics, sociology and social theory, including authenticity and authentication (Bucholtz, 2003), belonging (Guibernau, 2013), field and habitus (Bourdieu, 1993, 2000), discourse formations and gaze (Foucault, 1989, 2003) and resistance (Seymour, 2006). The second half of the chapter examines an excerpt from an interview with an English-medium instruction lecturer, drawing on constructs developed in the first part. The aim is to show how the version of PT presented can lead to a detailed and nuanced interpretation of the construction of identity, turn by turn, in an interaction.

To see how education can offer a space for contending with the ubiquitous problem of boredom, I first need to begin to define what boredom is and understand how it constitutes a “problem” for the pursuit of a flourishing life. The most vexing kind of boredom is what Heidegger describes as “existential boredom,” characterized by a disenchantment with life and a struggle to find meaning. In contrast to situational boredom, which ebbs and flows depending upon external conditions, existential boredom is often an enduring condition that, while affected by material conditions, is not reducible to them. Situational boredom points to a clear and immediate solution in some kind of action, while the cure for existential boredom is often unclear. Even more problematic, as I will argue, the avoidance of situational boredom intensifies existential boredom. The pervasive cures for situational boredom are the causes of existential boredom.

In this book, I make a case that schools should graduate students who know how to engage boredom productively when it arises. Rather than simply avoiding boredom or helplessly blaming boredom on something or someone else, such students take responsibility for their boredom. They develop internal resources for contending with boredom; they are adept and diplomatic at challenging boring circumstances, and they are equipped at finding worthwhile activities and practices that alleviate boredom. Such students acquire a capacity to discern a creative middle way between boredom avoidance, on the one hand, and stultifying boredom endurance, on the other hand. This middle way, I will argue, is the practice of leisure.