Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings

Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings recognizes the importance and innovativeness of the musician and artist Joni Mitchell and the need for a collection that theorizes her work as musician, composer, cultural commentator and antagonist. It showcases pieces by established and early career academics from the fields of popular music and literary studies on subjects such as Mitchell's guitar technique, the politics of aging in her work, and her fractious relationship with feminism. The collection features close readings of specific songs, albums, and performances while also paying keen attention to Mitchell's wider cultural contributions and significance.

Table of Contents:
List of Permissions Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Ruth Charnock, University of Lincoln, UK Section I. “The breadth of extremities”: Voice, Instrument, Feeling Chapter 1. “The Hexagram of the Heavens, The Strings of My Guitar”: Joni Mitchell's Crip Virtuosity Matthew L. Jones, University of Georgia, USA Chapter 2. “Oh Borderline”: Joni Mitchell's Aging Voice As a Site of Queer Resistance Emily Baker, University of Liverpool, UK Chapter 3. Both Sides, Now: Voice, Affect, and Thirdness Joanne Winning, Birkbeck College, UK Chapter 4. “Dreams and False Alarms”: Melancholy in the Work of Joni Mitchell Anne Hilker, Bard Graduate Center, USA Section II. "The only [black] man in the room"?: Mitchell's Milieu Chapter 5. In Search of Lost Chords: Joni Mitchell, The Last Waltz, and the Refuge of the Road Gustavus Stadler, Haverford College, USA Chapter 6. Tar Baby and the Great White Wonder: Joni Mitchell's Pimp Game Eric Lott, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA Chapter 7. Tangled Up in Blue: The Shadow of Dylan and Stylistic Swerves in Early Seventies Joni Mitchell Howard Wilde, University of Hull, UK Section III. “Busy being free”: Love, Time, Feminism Chapter 8. “Here's a man and a woman sitting on a rock”: Joni Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, and Irritable Feminism Pamela Thurschwell, Sussex University, UK Chapter 9. Hollow: “Cactus Tree” and the Signs of Freedom Peter Coviello, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Chapter 10. “The only thing that's never going away”: Still Listening to Blue Ruth Charnock, University of Lincoln, UK List of Contributors Index

About the Author :
Ruth Charnock is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, UK. She is the author of Anaïs Nin: Bad Sex, Shame and Contemporary Culture (forthcoming, 2019) and various articles and essays on Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Anaïs Nin, contemporary American literature, and popular culture.

Review :
A welcome addition to the serious scholarship on the creative contributions of Joni Mitchell. Approaching her work from fresh and surprising angles, the authors provoke a spirited conversation-eloquent, funny, cutting, dense with allusion. A loving look at the legacies and contradictions of a towering figure of popular music. There's still a lot to explore in the work of Joni Mitchell. This eclectic collection of texts looks at some of the lesser-known aspects of her musicianship in a way that reflects the multiplicity of Mitchell and her audience. Joni Mitchell has been widely acknowledged as a central figure in popular music, yet as far as serious inquiry goes, she also seems perpetually underserved. This may be because much writing about Mitchell either veers precipitously into the personal and emotional, or focuses determinedly on technical analysis of her music. This anthology crucially aligns both approaches as a way of challenging the boundaries between the pop heart and the scholarly mind. Decades-long conversations about Mitchell, feminism, and race are advanced in new ways here, while wholly surprising inquiries into her relationship to disability and queerness vastly expand the conversation. And in every essay, there's a sense of what Mitchell calls 'solid love'-tested and blessed-the kind of deep work on a crucial artist that only comes from a scholar's self-aware commitment to her work over time.