American Lit Remixed: Music in Twenty-First-Century American Literature identifies a new sound emerging in digital age-literature. It reads works including A Visit from the Goon Squad and Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play through the lens of remix theory, a term Eduardo Navas coined to describe the remix as a form of artistic and cultural discourse. I argue that digital-age American fiction, poetry, and drama offer new modes of connecting to self, others, and place through remixing the music and technology of the past.

 

Musical features such as references to popular songs and structural similarities to music recordings lend a retro sound, feel, and structure to contemporary American texts, even when they address life in the digital era. Literature engages with the musical past in order to remix the twenty-first century’s dystopian, disconnected ethos and find hope for the future.

 

Critics often focus on technology’s negative impact on writing and the music industry, but American Lit Remixed emphasizes music as a source of creative potential in twenty-first-century literature, including new ways of storytelling and relating.

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Watch my author talk at Central Connecticut State University here.