The young nostalgics: contemporary constructions of "pastness" on Tumblr microblogs

This thesis analyses contemporary constructions of "pastness", as nostalgically expressed by an online community on the popular microblogging platform Tumblr. Drawing on original ethnographic and semiotic work, as well as on a wide range of sources centred on its medical past and subsequent literary, psychological and social acculturation throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, I plead for an understanding of nostalgia not as the reactionary, inauthentic, naive or irretrievably commercial social disease that (similarly nostalgic) mainstream academic discourses have framed it as, but rather as a pervasive, protean and often misunderstood complication, or consequence of modernity — one that, I continue to argue, can facilitate culturally complex, if ambivalent, forms of personal expression. In the specific case of my participants, young people articulating their vision of themselves and of the world through publically available (yet also privately informed and interpersonally mediated), digitally synesthetic narratives, I show how the emotion becomes further entangled in biographical, transbiographical, historical and transhistorical, as well as aesthetic, emotional and artistic contingencies. This amounts to a highly idiosyncratic, symbolically coherent reflexive ideology, the cultural significance of which my thesis will contextualize, interpret and draw important conclusions from.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Nottingham Trent University

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Munteanu, DG