My work provides a broad framework for reformulating subject-object relations, which requires a critical transfer of different literary and scientific ideas into other social and historical contexts. The project tracks transformations of consciousness using cultural studies and genre criticism put in relation to popular writing and other embodied practices of meaning-making. The dissertation, through its crosslinking of literary and cultural “texts” culled from drastically different registers, provides an extended genealogy of New Wave science fiction (SF) and its legacy, with particular emphasis put on their shared interest in altered states—from the project of speculative aesthetics to the power of affective encounters found in not only fiction but in the strange performances and experimental practices of the sixties counterculture(s)—that I argue extend into the late twentieth century. What might this particular cross-section of cultural narratives and counter histories offer us for rethinking processes of historical change through the more flexible and capacious category of feeling? What sort of alternative forms of world-making might help us find new paths through and to pleasure, poetry, and politics? Can we learn to adapt to experiences of disorientation long enough to change directions? The archive’s means and methods of losing control and getting lost make inroads into unknown and unknowable spaces and end up in unexpected and unexplainable places. These open strategies and technical tactics for moral and ideological realignment animate my line of inquiry, so that “Futurist Folklore and Materialist Magic” can conduct in-depth studies in a survey of literary and cultural formations from the post-1945 American context, stressing the post-1965 period. Charting New Wave SF while also moving across idiosyncratic yet imbricated countercultures—drugs, cults, and cut-ups—the dissertation analyzes the material, psychological, social, political, and sign systems that differentially legitimate and delegitimate popular practices so as to clarify the co-evolution of what are a set of decidedly American values as they appear in the national, cultural imaginary. Drawing from affect theory, embodied cognition, and relational subjectivity to study such desired objects requires taking an ethnographic stance toward popular literacies and fan practices, which enables the dissertation to contribute to the growing body of interdisciplinary work on the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as a way to both take seriously and recuperate value for what might otherwise be thought of as misreading(s) that move people, nevertheless. Using a transposable and adaptable apparatus of theoretical lenses in combination with historical specificity and devotion to specific materials that are more often left in the margins and interstices allows me to add to critical scholarship from a position of nuanced expertise—each of the three chapter’s focal point is a specific moment in literary history and its connection(s) to another particularized iteration of the mid-to-late twentieth-century’s American counterculture. The first chapter focuses on J.G. Ballard’s psychonaut manifesto and introduces key historical antecedents to the New Wave to anchor the countercultures examined, broadly—William S. Burroughs (cut-ups), John C. Lilly (drugs), and L. Ron Hubbard (cults). I move into a narrower literary analysis the second and third chapters on Philip K. Dick and Octavia E. Butler.