In contemporary consumer culture, branding is the term given to the creation of an image or text (visual, aural, textural or multi-sensory) intended to represent a commodity or product sold by a producer or service provider. This product’s commercial viability depends largely on the way it is presented (via branding) to its target market. The aim of this research report is to show that music used consciously as a branding medium, with special reference to film music (in its commodified form), has become a brand in itself, as opposed to merely a component of a multi-modal commercial product. Through analyses of a central film music theme from Star Wars: Episode IV, composed by John Williams, I aim to identify what I will term `audio-branding techniques’ within the music, thereby showing how music has come to be regarded as a brand. The audio branding techniques will relate directly to the four levels of analysis that I propose to conduct. The nature of branding implies the presence of three entities in the cultural and commercial `transaction’ that takes place: namely, the service provider (creator), the product (commodity) and the target market (consumer). I intend to argue that, as a result of powerful creative collaborations between John Williams and his various directors (not to mention his own unique talent), this composer’s film music has increasingly become an audio brand which is almost commensurate with the brand status of the film itself. Williams’s ability to create a symbiotic relationship between a music brand and that of a film has set him apart from most other contemporary art and commercial composers. As a result, it is not simply the actors, directors and producers associated with a movie that induce one to buy tickets to see it, but Williams’s independent audio branding style as well. I thus aim to prove that his film music is an audio brand independent of, and yet also allied with, other brands.

Negli ultimi anni l’autore americano John Edward Williams (1922-1994) è stato riscoperto grazie all’incredibile successo del suo terzo romanzo, "Stoner" (1965), ripubblicato negli Stati Uniti nel 2006 e apparso in Europa tra il 2009 e il 2013. Per molto tempo Williams era stato uno scrittore poco considerato dal pubblico e dalla critica perché la sua prosa misurata ed elegante era in controtendenza rispetto alle forme dominanti nella letteratura americana della seconda metà del Novecento. Oggi egli è apprezzato soprattutto come maestro di stile, ma l’analisi dei suoi tre romanzi principali ("Butcher’s Crossing", "Stoner", "Augustus") rivela anche altri aspetti originali della sua opera. Innanzitutto, Williams sfida le rappresentazioni egemoniche dell’eroismo americano: i suoi protagonisti sono, infatti, caratterizzati dalla capacità di sopportazione, dalla pazienza e dal senso di responsabilità verso il loro lavoro. Inoltre, egli si distanzia dalle narrazioni trionfalistiche della storia statunitense: tracciando la parabola discente dell’impero americano dalla fine dell’Ottocento fino al secondo dopoguerra, i suoi romanzi mostrano come una nazione fondata sulla conquista, la distruzione e le disuguaglianze sociali sia destinata all’autodistruzione. Nel primo capitolo di questa tesi viene tratteggiata la carriera di Williams come romanziere, accademico, critico e poeta, esaminando le sue posizioni letterarie nel contesto culturale degli anni Sessanta e Settanta. I tre capitolo successivi sono invece dedicati a "Butcher’s Crossing" (1960), "Stoner" e "Augustus" (1972), analizzati in relazione ai loro sottogeneri (western, "academic novel" e romanzo storico) e ad alcuni temi che emergono nell’opera di Williams (la relazione tra l’uomo e la natura, l’eredità puritana, la raffigurazione dei personaggi femminili). / In recent years, the American author John Edward Williams (1922–1994) has been rediscovered, thanks to the incredible success of his third novel, "Stoner" (1965), which was republished in the United States in 2006 and appeared in Europe between 2009 and 2013. For a long time, Williams had been neglected as a writer because his restrained and elegant prose was antithetical to the dominant forms of late-twentieth-century American literature. Today he is considered a master of style, but an analysis of his three major novels ("Butcher’s Crossing", "Stoner", and "Augustus") reveals other original elements in his fiction. First, Williams challenges hegemonic representations of American heroism: his protagonists are characterized by endurance, patience, and a sense of responsibility to their jobs. Moreover, Williams distances himself from triumphalist narrations of American history: tracing the descending parable of the American empire from the end of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, his novels show that a nation founded on violence, conquest, and social contradictions is bound to destroy itself. In the first chapter of this thesis, I trace Williams’s career as a novelist, academic, critic, and poet, examining his literary positions in the cultural context of the sixties and seventies. The study then proceeds by analyzing "Butcher’s Crossing" (1960), "Stoner", and "Augustus" (1972) in relation to their subgenres (Western, academic novel, and historical novel) and some themes that emerge in Williams’s writing (the relationship between man and nature, the American Puritan heritage, and the representation of female characters).

<p>A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested. </p>

A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested.