Habitually the inter in intermediality is conceived of as the interrelation between neatly
distinguishable semiotic systems and projected as intercompositional agenda. While there are
benefits of such a research design it fails to fully fathom both pop music and its potential
ties to the literary text. Such relations can better be grasped by including the logic of
literature as social system and the mediality of communication - in fiction as well as in pop
music. 'Sonic Fictions of America' defines pop music as medial cluster strongly informed by the
indexical effects of recording technologies. How then does pop affect literature? More often
than not literature has shown a surprising capacity to immunize itself against the threat of
the popular turning to familiar forms and styles to evoke pop phenomena. Discussing a rich
array of prose texts from Ralph Ellison to Bret Easton Ellis this study delineates a rather
slow shift towards the end of these self-immunizing tendencies.
