ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 expands the scope of the book both temporally and geographically. ‘Jazz’ and ‘rave’ fiction will serve to counterpoint the previous analyses and to probe the acoustic self in new contexts. My aim is not to turn the concept into a universal tool, quite the contrary: I explore how the postmodern musicalization of fiction further complicates the modernist questions from new vantage points. Rafi Zabor’s The Bear Comes Home (1998) is a New York jazz novel that displays a different tradition and musical canon from the novels discussed previously, while the rave novel, Trevor Miller’s Trip City (1989) illustrates how electronically produced music does not abandon the human body, but instead intensifies the focus on embodiment.
