Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Contemporary literature has a new sound, and it is the sound of music. Features include music-related content and allusions, structural similarities to forms of sound recording, and metareferential elements. Literature also thematically treats the riffing, adaptation, and borrowing inherent within popular music. Consider “Sonnet, with Rick Springfield” (2014) by Sherman Alexie, which visually mimics a cassette tape. The poem’s numerical list of ideas evokes tracks on a mixtape, such as the Rick Springfield mix the narrator describes. While the cassette mixtape has become a relic of times past, the poem’s use of it to tell a story is a recent innovation, one that appears in works by important voices in U.S. and world literature. Why do contemporary writers turn to music more often? Why do twenty-first century poems, short stories, novels, and plays frequently use musical structures and themes as a mode of organization and a source of content? This paper interprets the decline of rock music and the digital revolution as a touchstone for literary explorations of a landscape changed by Amazon, self- and e-publishing, streaming, social networking, and consumers’ ability to rate, review, and share the media they consume.