EXCESSIVE FLASHPOINTS, SOLITARY DEMANDS, DARKEST CORNERS:

In Excessive Flashpoints, Solitary Demands, Darkest Corners: Ian Curtis, Joy Division, Critical Theory, and Me I inquire into issues of fundamental and ultimate concern: the meaning, value, and purpose of existence; our responsibility to and for others; human beings as complex, multiple, contradictory, and dynamic; the challenge of intimacy and the power of love; the quest for authenticity and the struggle for integrity; what it means to be included and excluded along with how as well as why this occurs; how social change happens along with what can be the contribution of artistic and cultural work toward this transformation; and the ethical responsibility to confront myriad metaphorical 'darknesses' in our individual and social lives, despite how challenging, difficult, and painful such confrontation can so often be. 

I pursue this inquiry by staging a dialogue between critical theory and popular music. I explore how intelligent, sensitive popular music engages the same issues as does critical theory and can help us to better understand and especially better feel how vital, urgent, concrete, and relevant critical theory can be. I use the music as art of pioneering post-punk musician Ian Curtis and his band Joy Division as my vehicle in so doing, drawing upon my experience teaching five upper level undergraduate university classes focused on Ian Curtis, Joy Division, and Critical Theory, at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Joy Division has been my persistently all-time favorite musical group and Ian Curtis my persistently all-time favorite individual musician, and the work I have done in teaching the aforementioned classes, and on this book, represents my attempt to account for how and why that might be. 

 As a part personal memoir, I make reference to diverse areas and periods of my life-experience but I concentrate on my 38 years as a university teacher, and in particular as a teacher of critical theory and of critical studies in literature, film, television, popular music, and popular culture. 

This is a book, in sum, for anyone who loves popular music, who cares to think and talk about 'big issues', who believes in the importance of empathy, and who would like to help contribute toward forging a substantive culture of solidarity-especially by engaging with what popular culture, and in particular popular music, has to offer in that quest. 

I hope this book will show readers that critical theory can be concrete, relevant, and urgent-especially in sustained dialogue with popular culture and in particular popular music-and that popular culture, notably popular music, can, in turn, contribute meaningful and impactful ways of helping make sense of, along with meaningful and impactful modes of helping engage with, issues of ultimate and fundamental importance. 

Bob Nowlan worked for 38 years as a university-level faculty member, concentrating in critical theory and in critical studies in literature, film, television, popular music, and popular culture, including 27 years as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire where Bob is now professor emeritus. Bob has maintained an absolutely immense passion concerning Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Bob’s all-time favorite musician and all-time favorite music group, for more than 45 years. Bob is producer and dj host of the weekly show Insurgence with WHYS Community Radio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and of the weekly show Left Edge Radio with KNSJ Community Radio in San Diego, California. Bob lives with his husband and life-partner, Andy Swanson, and their two dogs, Aidan and Patrick, both pugs, in San Diego, California.