Tom McCarthy 
Transmission and the Individual Remix 

Listen…A set of signals has been pulsing, repeating, modulating in the airspace of literature…This essay is an invitation to listen to those signals, as they travel through and shape the work of Aeschylus and Ovid, Rilke, Conrad, Burroughs, Joyce and others. To retune our idea of what a writer does, of what the very act of writing ‘is’. To rethink literature itself along the lines of transmission and reception, signal and noise…Listen: two times. I repeat…Message ends.