Do You Believe in Pop?: Nick Hornby's High Fidelity as 'Popliteratur' Book

This study examines the role of Nick Hornby?s novel High Fidelity within the context of the German 1990ies literary genre ?Popliteratur?. Works of this genre relate their storytelling directly to contemporary pop culture. Since pop music and other aspects of popular culture also occur as major themes in High Fidelity, the question arises how Hornby employs references to songs, films or television programs in comparison to authors of ?Popliteratur?. In the course of this book, parallels and differences between Hornby?s writing and the German pop genre will be extracted and assessed. The history and underlying literature theory of ?Popliteratur? will be presented and analysed by providing an overview of its aesthetic development throughout the last 50 years. On the basis of two recent approaches to more contemporary ?Popliteratur? by Moritz Baßler and Eckhard Schumacher High Fidelity will be evaluated as to its genre related correspondance. Employing methods of critical discourse, observation of genre conventions and text interpretation, the aim of this investigation is to clarify whether High Fidelity belongs to the canon of ?Popliteratur?.Read More