CANYON, Texas (KAMR/KCIT) — West Texas A&M University faculty members have published new books on Iron Maiden’s music and a Peruvian author, highlighting important cultural themes and issues.
According to WT officials, Dr. Martin M. Jacobsen, associate professor of English, explores the dense lyrical output of the metal band in “Pieces of Minds: The Intellectual Tradition of Iron Maiden,” and Dr. Eduardo Huaytán-Martínez, assistant professor of Spanish and director of the Spanish program, spotlights systemic oppression in Peru in an annotated edition of Zoila Aurora Cáceres’s 1929 novel “Montalván, La Negra.” Both are faculty members in the Department of English, Philosophy and Modern Languages in WT’s Sybil B. Harrington College of Fine Arts and Humanities.
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“Iron Maiden’s particular innovation comes not only in the form of musical adaptation but also in an open exhibition of intellectual interests,” Jacobsen writes in his book’s introduction. “Iron Maiden … (pays) homage to the larger, predominantly Western, intellectual tradition, borrowing freely from literature, history, cinema, and philosophy in the same way they have extracted musical elements from the bands that preceded them.”
Jacobsen taught classes at WT that explored heavy metal as literature between 2013 and 2018. That led to his embrace by the genre’s fans nationwide and to opportunities for work in magazines and fan-run websites, as well as writing the liner notes for “Great Lefty: Live Forever!”, an album paying tribute to Black Sabbath co-founder Tony Iommi. The class also led to the publication of the Iron Maiden book in January by The Edwin Mellen Press. The book’s title is a riff on the band’s seminal 1983 album “Piece of Mind,” for which songs were inspired by the likes of Frank Herbert and Alfred Lord Tennyson…