Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'DeLillo, Don - Criticism and interpretation'

By tracking the intersection of contemporary fiction and the information technologies of the digital age, this thesis argues that the narratives being produced over the past ten years have evolved into a distinct genre of literature, one where the aesthetics of fragmentation and postmodern uncertainty must confront the new realities of a digitally saturated culture and society. In order to demonstrate this alteration in contemporary fiction, this thesis considers novels written within the past ten years that reflect on this new form of textuality, namely Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and David Eggers’ The Circle (2013). These texts demonstrate a paradigm shift in contemporary literature, a new kind of fiction in which American society, culture, economics, and politics, are all directly affected by various forms of digital mediatisation. These authors reflect an altered cultural zeitgeist within their fiction—writings which can be differentiated from the postmodern literary aesthetic—prompted by neoteric digital technologies coupled with the ubiquitous nature of the Internet. Although this topic is broad and covers multiple fields of scholarly interests, my thesis nonetheless concerns itself with a very specific line of questioning: will our authors have the imaginative wherewithal and social sensitivity to keep pace with changes brought forth by the explosion of information technologies? If so, what type of fiction is likely to emerge from this new digital environment? By taking a focused approach and using contemporary literature as representative of these massive social, economic, and political transformations, my research recalls Kurt Vonnegut’s “Canary in the Coal Mine” dictum: the writer has always been the first to notice the dramatic effects of technology on the individual and the culture at large.

This is a study of the poetry of Don Maclennan in four chapters. Chapter One explores the poetry's deep involvement with the immediate world, and with the being that encounters it. Chapter Two examines the corpus's mistrust of abstract thought, and its suggestions for alternative ways of intepreting (or at least approaching an interpretation of) our existential situation. Chapter Three deals with Maclennan's writing on the subject of death, while the final chapter looks at the response of the poetry to the fact of death: put simply, this is to learn to love the situation we are in, and to record our thoughts for future generations, thus reaching beyond death to share with others the necessarily unique experience of our one and only life.

Spectacles of justice preoccupy contemporary American culture. Legal culture---including the Watergate trials, the Lewinsky scandal, and OJ Simpson's trial for alleged murder---assumes a central place in the American imaginary. Configurations of the law are not limited to media reportage and televised docudramas. Nor are arbitrations confined to law faculties and the spaces of formal courts. Working through depictions of due process in different ways and in different zones, contemporary American writers point up the prevalence of legality in everyday life. Whether on college campuses, in TV studios and suburban homes, or at theatres and racetracks, justice mediates interpersonal relations. Personal narratives proliferate as modes of self-justification. Everyone has a right to represent her side of a story. As interpretations of reality, however, none of these stories can claim absolute justness. No one has a monopoly on the law or victimhood.
This dissertation inspects how Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Jane Smiley present the inconsistencies of the law. These American novelists emplot global escapes into their work as a means to inform notions of liberty and jurisprudence. For these writers, freedom requires the recognition of contradictory---and unanticipated---narratives. "Justice Theory" emerges where media, gambling, performance, and suburban studies intersect with ethics, globalism, and narratology. In Franzen's novel The Corrections and essay collection How to Be Alone, self-validation requires the appreciation of the stories of others. In DeLillo's later works, particularly the plays The Day Room and Valparaiso, justice materializes in terms of isolation and the will to alter personal stories. For Smiley, as construed in her long novels The Greenlanders and Horse Heaven, dynamic responsive actions attend risky, unpredictable encounters in competitive milieus like the racetrack. These authors reveal that executions of justice and the perpetration of injustice involve varied consequences. The law is not only about punishment and recompense. Rather, legality directs the consequences of its applications toward the ideal of justice, which evolves alongside the subjects that it serves and the stories that they relate.

Orientador: Marcos Antônio Siscar
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-23T15:09:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Santucci_IsabellaCristinaStangherlin_M.pdf: 1947248 bytes, checksum: a55952ad63ed1c55a1055229aa8d2f54 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013
Resumo: Em 1789 um novo século se impôs ao mundo. Das Luzes à Escuridão, o homem francês tornou-se apenas homem. O medo, o silêncio e o tédio invadiam o coração de uma sociedade. O sublime, ou o grotesco, como diria Victor Hugo, inevitavelmente levaria a outra revolução. Na política, nos costumes, nas artes, o novo urgia por eclodir. Nesse cenário, Stendhal, homem, crítico e escritor de seu tempo, quer-se portador de uma reviravolta nunca antes concebida. Quer, assim, olhar para sua nação e refletir através do reino das palavras o que nela encontrava. Quer, da mesma maneira, retratar a alma de seus contemporâneos, ávida de emoções e de algo que há muito a França desconhecia, o amor-paixão. Para tanto, decide exumar como herói o demônio das terras do midi, o transgressor por natureza, o amante indomável, Don Juan. A presente dissertação, diante desse fato, tem por escopo a análise dessa figura que se torna central na produção romanesca do autor ao se transfigurar em miroir de um século e de uma nação pós-revolucionários. E nesse percurso, passando pelos diversos modelos de Don Juan da história literária pelo próprio Stendhal relembrados e criticados, observaremos de que maneira se constituiu seu ideal de Romantismo, o Beau moderne, em meio à incessante busca por um herói verdadeiro
Abstract: In 1789, a new century imposed itself on the world. From Light to Darkness, the French man became just a man. Fear, silence and boredom invaded the heart of a society. The sublime, or the grotesque, as would say Victor Hugo, nothing else could provoke but the revolution. In politics, in mores, in arts, the new urged to hatch. In this scenario, Stendhal, man, critic and writer of his time, wants to hold a twist never before conceived. He wants, then, to look to his nation and reflect through the realm of words that which he could find in it. He wants, in the same way, to portray the soul of his contemporaries, eager for emotions and of something that remained unknown to France for a long time, love-passion. Therefore, Stendhal decides to exhume as hero the devil of midi's land, the transgressor by nature, the untamed lover, Don Juan. This thesis, in the face of this fact, has as its goal the analysis of this figure that became central in Stendhal's novelistic work as he is transfigured in miroir of a century and of a post-revolutionary nation. And along this path, passing through many different Don Juans of literary history, remembered and criticized by Stendhal, we will observe how it has constituted his ideal of Romanticism, the Beau moderne, amid the ceaseless quest for a true hero
Mestrado
Historia e Historiografia Literaria
Mestra em Teoria e História Literária

Né en 1630, sous la plume du moine espagnol Tirso de Molina, le personnage de Don Juan n'a cessé d'inspirer les auteurs, au point de devenir un véritable mythe littéraire. On ne saurait, désormais, l'évoquer sans mentionner quelques œuvres majeures, telles que le Dom Juan de Molière ou le Don Giovanni de Mozart. S'il est difficile de trouver, au 20ème siècle, des réécritures du scénario mythique susceptibles de rivaliser avec ces illustres noms, il est indéniable que ce dernier demeure productif. La France offre, à elle seule, des preuves de cette vitalité. En effet, l'histoire de Don Juan continue à inspirer les auteurs. Elle semble même avoir conquis de nouveaux genres littéraires : longtemps cantonné au théâtre, c'est, pourtant, dans le genre romanesque que le héros mythique trouve actuellement ses traitements les plus originaux.Mais ces réécritures littéraires sont enrichies, au 20ème siècle, par deux apports fondamentaux. La critique, tout d'abord, qui multiplie les angles d'approche sur le mythe et entretient, à son tour, un dialogue fertile avec les œuvres de fiction. Cette dimension réflexive renouvelle considérablement le regard porté sur la fable donjuanesque. Le cinéma, ensuite, qui, en s'emparant du mythe, en propose de nouvelles lectures. Cependant, cette productivité ne doit pas occulter un constat : pour s'adapter à notre époque, le canevas mythique a souffert de nombreuses modifications. Ces dernières sont-elles la preuve de la plasticité du mythe et la garantie de sa survie ou, au contraire, des étapes pouvant aboutir à sa déconstruction ? Il importera de se demander, en définitive, si Don Juan ne risque pas d'être victime de la fascination qu'il inspire.

Part 1: ‘True Receivers': Rilke and the Contemporary Poetics of Listening In this part of this thesis I argue that a contemporary ‘poetics of listening' has emerged in the UK, and explore the writing of three of our most significant poets - John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson - to find out why they have become interested in the idea of the poet as a ‘listener'. I suggest that the appeal of this listening stance accounts for their engagement with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, who thought of himself as a listening ‘receiver'; it is proposed that Rilke's notion of ‘receivership' and the way his poems relate to the earthly (or the ‘non-human') also account for the general ‘intensification' of interest in his work. An exploration of the shifting status of listening provides context for this study, and I pay particular attention to the way innovations in audio and communications technology influenced Rilke's late sequences the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. A connection is made between Rilke's ‘listening poetics' and the ‘listening' stance of Ted Hughes and Edward Thomas; this establishes a ‘listening lineage' for the contemporary poets considered in the thesis. I also suggest that there are intriguing similarities between the ideas of listening that are emerging in contemporary poetics and Hélène Cixous' concept of ‘écriture féminine'. Exploring these similarities helps us to understand the implications of the stance of the poet-listener, which is a counter to the idea that as a writer you must ‘find your voice'. Finally, it is proposed that ‘a poetics of listening' would benefit from an enriched taxonomy. Part 2 of the thesis is a collection of my poems entitled ‘Small Weather'.

Rethinking the Dualism: Don DeLillo's White Noise and the Ecocritical Possibilities of the Nature/Culture Mix questions current applications of ecocriticism and offers that these applications are inadequate in dealing with the perceived nature/culture dualism. This thesis suggests that ecocritics need to stop thinking in dualistic terms, but instead must consider that the separation between nature and culture is an illusion created by the postmodern culture. Don DeLillo's White Noise, then, is used to illustrate the possibilities of rethinking the relationship between nature and culture. DeLillo exposes the illusion of the dualism by constantly implicating humans in the alteration of nature and, despite humans' attempts to live within the illusory dualism by controlling nature through tecimology, by revealing that man's efforts will always fail through unintended consequences. This thesis culminates by proposing that considering nature and culture as connected entities that constantly reshape each other will absorb dualistic thinking and provide opportunities for ecocritics to expose truths that are vital to fueling the desire to alter destructive relationships between nature and culture.
Graduation date: 2004

This thesis takes up J. G. Ballard's contention, that 'the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else,' to show that Don DeLillo uses a particular sexual, cultural economy of adultery, understood in its many loaded cultural and literary contexts, as a model for semantic reproduction. I contend that DeLillo's fiction evinces a promiscuous model of language that structurally reflects the myth of the adulterous triangle. The thesis makes a significant intervention into DeLillo scholarship by challenging Paul Maltby's suggestion that DeLillo's linguistic model is Romantic and pure. My analysis of the narrative operations of adultery in his work reveals the alternative promiscuous model. I discuss ten DeLillo novels and one play - Americana, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II,Underworld, the play Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and the pseudonymousAmazons - that feature adultery narratives. I demonstrate that these narratives resist conservative models of language, space, and sex by using promiscuity as a method of narrative control. I argue that DeLillo's adultery narratives respond subversively to attempts to categorise his work, and that he extends the mythologised rhetoric of the adulterous triangle by adopting sexual transgression as a three-sided semantic structure that connects language, sex, and space. I refer to theories of narrative, postmodernity, space, desire, and parody to show that DeLillo's adultery narratives structurally influence his experiments with linguistic meaning. My analysis reveals that contradiction performs at several spatial, sexual, and dialogical levels to undermine readings that suggest DeLillo's language models pure meaning. I identify the sexualised fissure within DeLillo's semantic style that is exposed by the operation of contradiction. I believe this gap distinguishes DeLillo from postmodern fiction's emphasis on the placeless, because it is a meaningful space that emphasises the reproductive adulteration of signification. I expose several sites of dialectic rupture, including the hotel/motel room, oppositional and metaphorical description, the journey, the image, and the secret. I contend that sex in these transgressive narratives is a model for something else: promiscuous meaning. This thesis demonstrates that DeLillo's fiction charts the typography of the mythical third side of the adulterous triangle in order to respond to language's own promiscuity.

This study discusses works by Martin Amis and Don DeLillo in the context of several key scientific and technological transformations that occur in the aftermath of the Second World War. I begin by revisiting one of the most-discussed aspects of DeLillo's work: the currents conspiracy and paranoia that recur in his novels and, he claims, pervade the wider culture. By demonstrating how paranoid narratives strive to accommodate contemporary technologies, I create a context in which the paranoia addressed in works such as Libra and Underworld becomes intelligible as a response to the specific technological character of surveilance and control in the post-War period. The sciences of information and cybernetics also cohere in the years folowing the War, and the second chapter explores the creative tension between metaphors of entropy and information in Amis's fiction as wel as DeLillo's. The third chapter focuses on television as a constitutive element of postmodernity, and traces how DeLillo and Amis adopt narrative strategies that enable them to represent subjects who have grown accustomed to living within an environment mediated, to an unprecedented degree, by visual imagery supplied by or formatted for television. Another product of postmodern technology, commercial air travel reconfigures relationships to place and to time for inhabitants of industrialized countries. Both the liberating and limiting consequences of living in the latter half of the century of flight are addressed in the fourth chapter. The final chapter offers an assessment of the role contemporary media and technology play in establishing the characteristics associated with postmodernity, and concludes with a brief discussion of the role the internet might play within the context of the specific technologies discussed in the body of the thesis.

‘“The Pure Event”—Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo’ examines the influence of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the oeuvres of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. This analysis begins from the viewpoint that the 9/11 attacks constitute an event, following the paradigm established by influential thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, that precipitates change not only in the political sphere, but in the cultural sphere as well. The 9/11 attacks constitute the beginning of the 21st century, and engender a new approach to the role of art, and especially of literature in America, and the West. The primary focus of this thesis is to explicate the ways in which Pynchon and DeLillo have grappled with the changes wrought by these terrorist attacks. This thesis contends that the primary focus of both authors is time, and that after the 9/11 attacks, the conception, and presentation, of time changes for both authors. The work begins with reference to Georg Lukács, who, writing on the development of the novel as the outstanding, and dominant, literary form of the twentieth century, argues that the twin concepts of form, and of time, provide the constitutive elements for the groundbreaking author to represent modernity in their work. This thesis then harnesses these concepts, arguing that there is an identifiable change within the works of DeLillo and Pynchon in their output before, and after, 9/11.

In this thesis I argue that the style of Don Banks’s early concert music can be conceptualised in terms of a set of decision-making principles that guided his compositional choices, and that the forces that formed this decision-making framework are directly attributable to the influence of his three main composition teachers, Maty as Seiber, Milton Babbitt, and Luigi Dallapiccola— influences that can be traced through the body of sketches and other related documents that Banks left after his death in 1980, and which are now held at the National Library of Australia. I begin by reviewing pertinent literature that relates to the concept of style in the arts, as well as to the debates concerning the applicability of sketch studies to musical analysis. In chapters 3-6 I trace the studies that Banks undertook with Seiber, Babbitt, and Dallapiccola, in order to determine the principal aesthetic and technical influences that these teachers exerted over his development as a composer. In these chapters I also study the composition of both the Duo for Violin and Cello (1951) and Psalm 70 (1953) since these works were written while Banks was a student of Seiber and Dallapiccola respectively. Then, in chapters 7-9, I continue to trace the development of his compositional style in the sketches for the Three Studies for Violoncello and Piano (1954), Pezzo Dramatico (1956), and the Sonata da Camera (1961). At certain points in between these chapters I pause to relate these analytical studies to Banks’s own technical and aesthetic views on musical composition, which he articulated in his own written documents and in his analyses and critiques of the compositions of other composers. I conclude that the specific direction in which Banks’s style developed during the 1950s was motivated by a process of reconciling the disparate and, at times, contradictory influences of his teachers, particularly of Seiber and Babbitt—a process that can be seen not in what he composed, but in how he composed his music.
[v.1]. Text -- [v.2]. Appendices

Readers have associated Don Quixote and St Ignatius of Loyola for centuries. Many have inferred an intentional parody of Loyola in Cervantes’ classic novel, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. The first part of this thesis traces reader associations of Don Quixote and St Ignatius since the publication of Part I of Don Quixote in 1605. The second part analyzes two texts commonly cited as sources for reader associations of St Ignatius and Don Quixote, Loyola’s Autobiografía (1555) and Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Vida de Ignacio de Loyola (1583), and proposes a hypothesis for how Cervantes may have intended to parody the founder of the Society of Jesus. The third part analyzes narrative, substantive and thematic parallelisms in Don Quixote, the Autobiografía and Vida and discusses the likelihood of Cervantes intentionally parodying Loyola in his most famous and enduring work.
Graduate
0679
0401
0318
pdavidso@uvic.ca

In this dissertation, the poetic thought of León Felipe is examined through the study of his works written during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), namely, Good bye, Panamá (1936); La insignia (1937); El payaso de las bofetadas y el pescador de caña (1938); and Español del éxodo y del llanto (1939). The poet's biographical and poetic paths are outlined, as they are closely linked. A diachronic approach is used to analyse his fundamental ideas or themes that emerge, evolve and merge through his writings during this period which shaped his unique cosmo-vision. The purpose of this dissertation is to study the works of the poet within the social-historical context in which they evolved, establish the importance of this period as the catalyst for his ideological and poetic thought, and analyse how these aspects are reflected in his poetry to give him a new and definitive voice.
Classics & Modern European Languages
M. A. (Spanish)