Play It Again: Reading the Contemporary through Music in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document


Hering, David ORCID: 0000-0001-7838-4815 (2021) Play It Again: Reading the Contemporary through Music in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document. Contemporary Women's Writing, 15 (2). pp. 244-259.

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Abstract

In this article, I argue that Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006) use music as a way to problematize postmodern approaches to history and temporality. Using Giorgio Agamben’s model of “the contemporary,” I argue that Egan and Spiotta stage an intergenerational dialogue by contrasting the listening habits of parents and children and thus enabling, in Agamben’s words, a “meeting place” between generations that recovers an understanding of duration through the shared act of experiencing music, one that can provide a clearer temporal view of the past and of possible futures.

Item Type: Article
Divisions: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 23 Nov 2021 08:20
Last Modified: 18 Jan 2023 21:24
DOI: 10.1093/cww/vpab034
Open Access URL: https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/15/2/244/6432...
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3143660
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