Anatomy of Thought-Fiction: CHS report, April 2214 [Paperback]

Focused on music, but with implications that extend to just about everything, Anatomy of Thought-Fiction explores the role of false ideas in our intellectual and emotional life. Joanna Demers??? elegant monograph (or should that be polygraph?) softly shatters myths and tenderly takes apart received wisdom. Yet this cluster-bomb of a book also leaves the reader convinced that illusions aren???t just useful, they???re indispensable: a thought at once unsettling and liberating.Why do people choose to believe things they know are untrue?In the year 2214, the Center for Humanistic Study has discovered an unpublished manuscript by Joanna Demers, a musicologist who lived some two centuries before. Her writing interrogates the music of artists ranging from David Bowie and Scott Walker to Kanye West and The KLF. Questioning how people of the early twenty-first century could have believed that music was alive, and that music was simultaneously on the brink of extinction, light is shed on why the United States subsequently chose to eliminate the humanities from universities, and to embrace fascism...Joanna Demers is associate professor of Musicology at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music, where she specializes in post1945 popular and art music.