When the literary scholar Dennis Yi Tenen was a child, his father brought home a reel-to-reel recording by the British prog metal band Uriah Heep. Tenen, who now teaches at Columbia, was born in Moldavia; in a recent interview with Douglas Rushkoff, he described the Uriah Heep album, their version of Jesus Christ Superstar, as “the first Western musical thing” he ever listened to. The experience marked him—the music, the exposed reel-to-reel, the way you could physically adjust the tape and hear a corresponding noise—but it does not appear in his new book, Literary Theory for Robots, at least not directly. The influence of Uriah Heep, and of that childhood episode, is subterranean. It’s part of his internal algebra, but who can say exactly how?
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