What sounds are you currently tuning out? Maybe the radio from a passing car, or the television audio streaming in from the next room, or the music gently piping in overhead as you read in a bookstore or café. In Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature, Justin St. Clair persuasively argues that this seemingly innocuous background sound is actually “an addressable channel, routinely exploited by sound-savvy filmmakers, advertisers, and employers” (4). Exploring this channel constitutes an “aural fixation” for postmodern American authors Kurt Vonnegut, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Ishmael Reed, and Thomas Pynchon (2). Its existence, St. Clair offers, helps fuel their concerns regarding governmental and corporate mass manipulation as well as their anxieties about literature's impending obsolescence in the face of new media.

Working at the intersection of sound studies, media studies, and literary studies, St. Clair's book makes important contributions to each. By recognizing background sound as a potential communications channel in its own right, St. Clair helpfully pushes beyond the signal-or-noise binary that many sound studies accounts borrow from information theory. Additionally, his choice of technologies extends the archive of media studies in relatively new directions. The player piano and Muzak (elevator music) have received only scant critical attention compared to the phonograph. While television, by contrast, is already a major object of cultural critique, St. Clair's specific focus on television audio helps us see (or hear) this medium in new ways. And though radio is likewise already a central critical concern, the author attends to such “neglected areas within radio criticism” as “audience studies and communication effects” (46). To support his analysis of each of these audio streams, St. Clair assembles an impressive body of historical data. But the standout contribution of Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature is the brilliant way it conceptualizes the meeting of literature and audio.

In a play on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, St. Clair theorizes the postmodern novel as “heterophonic” – as reflective of and responsive to a host of audio influences. He explains, “Heterophonia (or ‘multisoundedness’) is not only endemic to contemporary culture, but in these media-saturated times, our literary production has been steeped … in a cacophonous matrix of competing audio streams” (3). To navigate the cacophony of our contemporary soundscape, we routinely differentiate between foreground and background audio through a filtering practice that cultural sound historian Jonathan Sterne has termed “audile technique.”Footnote ¹ Postmodern writers, St. Clair contends, also employ audile technique, but they reverse its normal priorities by listening attentively to the background sounds most of us screen out.

How does the postmodern novel participate in this kind of close listening? Because novels are “diachronic” – their words and images unfolding individually in a temporal sequence – they focus “a reader's attention … on only one individual aural image at any given moment, a distinct advantage when it comes to aural critique” (6). Although all language is technically diachronic in structure, St. Clair suggests that postmodern novelists make the most concerted use of this linguistic feature. Moreover, they further engage in audile technique by remediating audio in their texts (translating aural inputs into print) through a range of other formal innovations. Thus Vonnegut and Gaddis, for example, not only employ the player piano thematically in their critique of mechanized and corporatized labor; they also formally code their texts like piano rolls, with dashes and ellipses taking the place of perforations (30, 41). And DeLillo, to cite one further example, formally reinforces his characterization of television audio as a “threat to domesticity” by “appropriat[ing] televisual voices … and subsequently redeploy[ing] them in structures that both echo and critique their televisual origins” (119, 116).

If it seems a contradiction for postmodern American novelists to at once deplore and deploy such audio streams in their work, this contradiction, St. Clair argues, is constitutional. The authors he considers express a “dialectical engagement with media aurality” in their novels, “a simultaneous impulse to repudiate and to utilize” (130). While they believe that the contemporary soundscape poses a significant threat to literature, they also recognize competing media as potential resources for literary experimentation. St. Clair creatively and carefully attends to these experiments. Ultimately, Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature provides an excellent tutorial in how to listen to literature (what its punning subtitle terms “novel listening”) and a compelling argument for why we should tune in.