How Fiction Represents Recordings: Towards a Political Ecology of Sound Technology in U.S. Novels Since 2000

Studies of sound technology in literature, though increasing in number, are yet to take stock of recorded music's damaging environmental consequences. My project will examine contemporary U.S. authors who articulate anxieties about recorded music's eventual decay, including Richard Powers, Paul Beatty and Jennifer Egan. I will argue that their work engages with recorded music's troubling manufacture, carbon footprint and difficult disposal: what is known as its political ecology. I contend that by representing mediated listening experience verbally, their writing reveals the terror and wonder of recordings in ways that have not been explored.