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

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.