Springsteen Fandom: A Lifetime Conversation - Paperback

by Nicolas Pethes (Author)

Springsteen Fandom: "A Lifetime Conversation" explores the experience of the Bruce Springsteen musical fandom as a mutual exchange between artist and audience.

Choosing significant stops of the Springsteen and E Street Band 2023 Tour as a narrative guideline, the book presents a thorough analysis of Springsteen's album conceptions, song lyrics, show rituals, and interviews. Based on a discussion of the ever-growing Springsteen scholarship, Pethes introduces artist-fan-communication as a notion that is not based on mere illusions but rather on actual emotions and practices.

For over 50 years, Bruce Springsteen has been a rock star with whom fans entertain a highly personal relationship. This is not only due to Springsteen's charismatic stage persona but also to the aesthetic conception of his music that the book explores based on Springsteen's own description of the relationship to his fans as a "lifetime conversation."

Author Biography

Nicolas Pethes is Professor of German Literature at the University of Cologne, Germany. His previous employments include visiting professorships at Stanford University, USA, as well as appointments at the Universities of Hagen and Bochum, Germany. He completed his dissertation on the poetics of memory in the works of Walter Benjamin in 1999 and has since published on the media history of literature, the interrelations between literature and science, critical discourse on new media technologies, and popular culture.