| "Novel Listening" is an interdisciplinary study of contemporary American literature that draws extensively on the emerging field of sound culture studies. Focusing on a variety of postmodern novels---including Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and Don DeLillo's White Noise---I argue that "heterophonia" is one of the governing logics of postmodern fiction. While Mikhail Bakhtin's influential concept of heteroglossia offers a compelling description of the proliferation of discourses that typifies the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novel, it does not provide an adequate account of the novel in the age of media saturation. My notion of heterophonia recasts Bakhtin's concept in terms of a multiplicity of sounds, substituting the competition of diverse audio streams for the dialogic tensions of "multilanguagedness." Despite the fact that the aural has long been understood as secondary or complementary---the ground to visual culture's figure---a handful of close-listening postmodern novelists helped offset what was, until quite recently, an anemic body of criticism by injecting their fiction with aurality, echoing, in turn, not only the sounds of our culture, but various discourses concerning sound in our culture.;This dissertation considers four sites of audio transmission---the player piano, radio, television audio, and Muzak installations---and traces the tendency of various audio streams to become increasingly subsumed as "background sound" as competition among them increases. From William Gaddis' use of the player piano in JR and Agape Agape to Pynchon's employment of Muzak in The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, postmodern novels, I claim, take notice of what often goes unheard. Subsequently, these novels not only incorporate various audio technologies as formal devices, but also critique a number of sound-based exercises in mass persuasion (i.e., the use of Muzak to influence consumer habits and employee productivity). In so doing, postmodern novels aesthetically and thematically draw attention to our own serious inattention---to the ease with which we can be sonically manipulated and to the potential of literature to bring us to our senses. |
