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McMinn, Robert Frank. "Don DeLillo, events and local gods." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.311725.
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Lambert, Stephanie. "Quotidian things : Don DeLillo and the everyday." Thesis, University of York, 2016. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/17220/.
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This thesis explores the politics of the everyday in Don DeLillo’s novels from 1982 to present. It contends that DeLillo’s canonization as an exemplar of postmodern depthlessness and ahistoricity has occluded his interest in mapping the connections between the particularity of daily life and the capitalist world- system. I position the theoretical framework of the everyday as a corrective to these readings, and seek to recover and foreground its Marxist orientation, whilst envisioning the everyday as a way of negotiating between deterministic applications of Marxist theory and the uncritical celebration of individualized resistance endorsed by the cultural turn. Drawing on the French sociologists Michel De Certeau and Henri Lefebvre’s theories of the everyday, the thesis extends De Certeau’s conception of the everyday as resisting the ‘grid of discipline’ and Lefebvre’s characterization of it as eluding the ‘grip of forms’ to attend to the intersection of politics and form. I conceptualise the everyday as operating at the nexus of plot and detail, digression and generic suspense, world-systemic totality and quotidian singularity. To examine the everyday is to turn to the overlooked and undervalued; DeLillo’s surpluses of quotidian detail pose a challenge to the value-logic of capital, its uneven manifestations, its invisiblized surplus populations and labour, as well as literary-critical systems of value. This thesis advances this theory of the everyday through explorations of DeLillo’s representations of waste, crowds, and terrorism, and traces lines of continuity rather than rupture between DeLillo’s work and supposedly ‘post-postmodern’ texts by David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Egan. My coda examines DeLillo’s move from digression to contraction in his ‘late style,’ arguing that this stylistic shift registers financialized exhaustion. Ultimately, this thesis pursues the claim that DeLillo’s everyday opens up utopian possibilities by challenging the value relations underlying everyday life, thereby allowing us to imagine its transformation.
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Scott, Christina S. "Don DeLillo : an annotated primary and secondary bibliography, 1971-2002 /." Ann Arbor : UMI, 2004. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40140445j.
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Beier, Carsten. "Postmoderner Realismus zum Romanwerk Don DeLillos." Berlin Logos-Verl, 2005. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=2806610&prov=M&dok_var=1&dok_ext=htm.
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Green, Jeremy Francis. "The fiction of Don DeLillo : language, identity, politics." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.281937.
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Yehnert, Curtis Alan. "Language and self in the novels of Don DeLillo /." The Ohio State University, 1993. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1248463964.
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Happe, François. "Ecriture et pouvoir dans les romans de Don Delillo." Orléans, 1998. http://www.theses.fr/1998ORLE1024.
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Don Delillo, écrivain américain contemporain, ne conçoit l'écriture de fiction que comme activité subversive, et ses onze romans constituent une véritable anatomie de la culture américaine. Se démarquant de la critique américaine qui se penche en priorité, sur les données thématiques et culturelles de l'oeuvre, cette thèse postule que les thèmes aussi pertinents soient-ils, ne valent que par les formes qui les portent, voire les façonnent. Elle se propose de montrer que l'écriture s'élabore contre les structures et les discours du pouvoir, d'analyser l'articulation entre les formes d'inscription du pouvoir de l'écriture et ce que celle-ci cherche à dire sur le pouvoir. Plaçant la fonction pragmatique de l'écriture au coeur de sa problématique, la première partie décline le paradigme de l'écart : exil des narrateurs, subversion des genres conventionnels, discours ironique élève au rang de mode d'écriture. La deuxième partie montre comment la fiction de Delillo force le lecteur a s'interroger sur les modes de saisie du réel. Les modalités de la représentation, iconique ou verbale, sont ainsi, dans les dix romans du corpus, le lieu d'un questionnement épistémologique, hermeneutique, mais aussi éthique. La troisième partie donne le réseau comme la figure achevée du pouvoir tel que le conçoit Delillo. Il s'agit ici de souligner l'adéquation entre l'objet de l'écriture (la mise en évidence des réseaux de pouvoir) et son propre processus (la mise en place des réseaux du sens). Ainsi le lecteur et les personnages se trouvent-ils impliqués dans un même déchiffrement paranoïaque+ Fiction must contest power ;, Don Delillo says. His eleven novels may be read as a critical anatomy of american culture, and much of the criticism published in the USA deals with the thematic and cultural aspects of his work. Postulating that the effectiveness of themes depends on the forms of writing, this thesis aims to show that the subversion of power in Delillo's fiction cannot be dissociated from the very process of writing. The first part deals with the notions of generic defamiliarisation (dominant ideologies being reinscribed by the codes of formula stories), and + decentredness ; as, for instance, in ironic discourse. The second part shows how Delillo's fiction questions the processes of apprehension of the real. By confronting various modes with each other (iconic and linguistic), Delillo forces the reader to reflect on epistemological, hermeneutic and, ultimately, ethical issues involved in the act of representation. The third part argues that the network is the figure of power in Delillo's fiction and underlines the perfect adequacy of the writing process (the organisation of signifying connections) to its object (the + plot ; as a set of connections). Readers and characters are thus involved in the same paranoid activity of decipherment
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Daanoune, Karim. "L'écriture de l'évènement dans la fiction de Don DeLillo." Thesis, Bordeaux 3, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014BOR30039/document.
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Cette thèse se propose d’interroger la notion d’événement comme motif organisateur de la fiction de Don DeLillo. En effet, l’assassinat du président J. F. Kennedy et les attentats du 11 septembre sont des phénomènes qui résistent infatigablement au « réel », et à toute traçabilité ontologique ou phénoménologique. À ce titre, ils excèdent la pensée et exigent une réponse nécessaire de l’auteur et de son écriture face à leur irruption. Ils représentent une incursion excessive dans le « réel » et se manifestent sous la forme du surplus. Mais l’événement n’est pas simplement un surplus de réalité, il est aussi un surplus de sens, entendu comme inadéquation du signe à ce qu’il désigne. Il s’agira de montrer dans un premier temps que l’événement se montre excessivement dans le retrait de sa monstration. Nous aborderons cette dialectique du voilement et du dévoilement à travers le prisme de l’Histoire en tenant compte de sa dimension non seulement phénoménologique et traumatique mais également à partir de la notion d’altérité que l’événement sous-tend. Ce paradoxe une fois révélé, nous nous pencherons sur la question du temps car l’événement remet en question l’origine qui le fait advenir et ne prend sens seulement que lorsqu’il est advenu. Il dérègle de facto la temporalité qui avait cours. Il sera alors question de mettre en lumière le dérèglement des instances du temps « classique » : passé, présent et futur. Nous nous focaliserons sur la question du ressassement en nous intéressant, par ailleurs, à la manière par laquelle les concepts de temps, d’événement et d’altérité fonctionnent de conserve. Enfin, nous aborderons l’événement en tant qu’événement-récit en accentuant notre étude sur le terrorisme et la terreur, notions indissociables de la fiction delillienne, en ce qu’ils fournissent des modèles de totalité et de totalisation que l’écriture de l’événement s’emploie — éthiquement — à défaire. En ce sens, l’événement prendra la forme d’un contre-événement. Il s’agira par conséquent de décrypter les événements de texte que DeLillo propose comme moyen de résistance à toute totalisation. Enfin, nous considèrerons certains personnages comme des événements dans la mesure où ils réassertent le caractère événemential de l’individuThis dissertation wishes to reflect upon the notion of event as an organizing principle in Don DeLillo’s fiction. The assassination of J. F. Kennedy and 9/11 are events that unflinchingly resist the real, or any kind of ontological and phenomenological traceability. They exceed understanding and demand a necessary response from the author and his writing. They represent the intrusion of an excessive reality within “the real” and manifest themselves in the guise of a surplus. But the event is not just a surplus of reality, it is also a surplus of meaning as it posits the inadequacy of the sign and its referent. We will first show how the event shows itself in the very way it shuns its own exposure. This dialectics of veiling and unveiling will be scrutinized through the lenses of History considered both in its phenomenological and traumatic dimensions but also as far as it relates to alterity or otherness. Once the paradox is revealed, we will consider the issue of time for the event defies the origin that makes it happen and makes sense only after it has happened. It thus shatters the temporal continuum commonly understood as past, present and future. We will then focus on the issue of a-temporality and show how time, event and alterity are inextricably linked together. We will finally look at the event understood this time as narrative by focusing our attention upon terror and terrorism as they provide models of totality the writing of the event attempts — ethically — at breaching and undoing. In this sense, the event wille be considered as a counter-event. It will be worth deciphering the textual events DeLillo proposes as a means of resisting totalization. We will also apprehend some key characters as events in their own rights as they reassert the evential dimension of the subject
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Bird, Benjamin. "Models of consciousness in the novels of Don Delillo." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2005. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/163/.
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This thesis argues that an appreciation of Don DeLillo's engagement with the problems of post-war philosophy of mind is essential to a full understanding of his work. It suggests that he examines various forms of scepticism that prevail in the postmodern treatment of consciousness and traces the disorientation to which they lead, especially the obstacles they present to the formation and development of subjectivity. Much previous criticism has tended to assume that DeLillo regards consciousness as effectively powerless, entrapped and determined by the action of all-powerful systems, whether technological, linguistic, or economic. By contrast, this thesis acknowledges the partial autonomy that DeLillo grants consciousness and notes his exploration of the various epistemologies open to it in contemporary culture. I argue that DeLillo's first six novels survey crucial questions in contemporary debates about consciousness, particularly those raised by the materialism and, paradoxically, the extreme intellectual abstraction characteristic of postmodern Western culture. Notable among these early themes are the reality and reliability of consciousness; the relationship between mind and body; the analogy between mind and computer; the properties of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and the rational and intuitive modes of thought that they are said to govern. I suggest that DeLillo's subsequent novels are increasingly preoccupied by intuitive models of consciousness that allow mind a considerably greater ontological status than that accorded to it in postmodem culture. These range from the implication, in The Names (1982) and White Noise (1984), that mind may be more powerful than language, or the prospect of death, to the communal model of consciousness that prevails in Libra (198 8), Mao 11 (199 1), and Underworld (1997), which, I argue, is close to the model outlined in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's work on schizophrenia. DeLillo's most recent novels, The Body Artist (2001) and Cosmopolis (2003), explore the possibility of a search for 'root identity', or consciousness as such, which, although seemingly driven by a desire to escape culture, remains quintessentially postmodern in its emulation of contemporary science's desire to account for the enigmatic relation between mind and body.
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Crawford, Nicholas Stephen. ""Beyond the maps of language" reconsidering Don Delillo's rock novel /." View electronic thesis, 2008. http://dl.uncw.edu/etd/2008-1/rp/crawfordn/nicholascrawford.pdf.
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Jones, Michael. "Self-seeing in Paul Auster, Philip Roth and Don Delillo." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2014. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/51589/.
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This thesis considers how Auster, Roth and DeLillo write in order to see themselves in the world. If Kafka's burrowing into himself and Nabokov's inscription of a chalk-white “I” on the inner blackboard of his shut eyelids exemplified Modernist strategies for projecting the isolated self into the world, my subject authors have confronted a theoretical situation in which the world as a permanent and common object doesn't exist. Negotiating an increasingly unreal American popular culture that stands in for this object and that has disassembled the monadic self, they reimagine the sight of darkness and premonitions of death inherited from their precursors' self-seeing as a means of reifying our world. The thesis proceeds in three author-specific chapters. The first traces Auster's chimeric appearances in the glass of fictive representation using popular cultural symbols. These symbols repeatedly erase the self, figuring its disappearance into the continuing present and giving the lie to a permanent visible world in which the self can be located. The second chapter explores Roth's writing characters as “darkening[s]” of the fictive glass. His fiction interrogates the obscure “inside of me” to locate an unseen point where the self is remade through transformative connections with the world. This connection, which he names “reality”, remains invisible, communicated in distorted images of grief and mourning that also reflect the unreal character of popular culture. In the final chapter, a new connection between the self and the world becomes visible in DeLillo's work. He reifies our dissembling culture by rendering it as a smeary, visible reflection of the unfixed, continuing present into which Auster's selves disappear. The sight of this unfixed, different world is co-eval with a new form of self-seeing in which the world is not permanent nor transparent but formed in characters' relationships to it, reciprocating today's wavering possibility of there being the world at all. In tracing the pursuit of self-seeing in the world in these three exemplary writers, the thesis develops a new relationship between the aesthetics of character and the world-rendering potential of novel-writing. In a period of theoretical transition after postmodernism, such new paradigms are vital for grasping how we envision selves now as reciprocations of the world's precarity, responding to the pressure of the real.
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Brooks, Carlo. "La préemption de l'image dans les romans de Don Delillo." Pau, 1999. http://www.theses.fr/1999PAUU1009.
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La preeminence de l'image, evidente dans l'oeuvre romanesque delillo, est ici rapportee a la notion de preemption de l'image consideree selon la definition que martin heidegger donne de l'image : l'"image" n'est pas une copie de l'etant mais la maniere dont celui-ci est rendu calculable par une preemption de tout ce qui ne correspond pas a un schema coherent. Weltbild (l'image-monde) n'est pas une image du monde mais le monde saisi comme une image. De meme, chez delillo, l'amerique est saisie comme une image: ses personnages cherchent une coherence dans l'image tout en manifestant un regret pour le "tableau entier," avec ses defauts, ses peripeties et ses dangers. La preemption de l'image est ensuite examinee au niveau du langage, notamment de la maniere dont le signifiant preempte le signifie pour se presenter comme une image completement souveraine vis-a-vis de la signification et de la reference. Enfin, la preemption de l'image est analysee dans son rapport avec la nature. On peut deceler chez les personnages de delillo un desir de connaitre une nature non determinee par la main de l'homme. Cependant, notre capacite a discerner le naturel est viciee par l'element autoreferentiel qui s'immisce dans les evenements et dans le moi. Il existe egalement chez delillo une preemption de l'image "naturelle," a savoir l'utilisabilite heideggerienne (zuhandenheit). Les personnages de delillo veulent percer la preemption de l'utilisabilite et fixer l'etant des yeux comme un objet "naturel. " or, ce desir d'une perspective surhumaine n'est rien d'autre que le desir de preempter l'etant au sens heideggerien de l'imageThe obvious preeminence of the image in the work of don delillo is related here to the notion of preemption of the image considered according to the definition martin heidegger gives to the image: the "image" is not a copy of what is but the way in which the latter is made calculable by the preemption of all that does not fit into a coherent pattern. Weltbild (the world image) is not an image of the world but the world seized as an image. Likewise, in delillo's novels, america is seized as an image: his characters search a coherence in the image while regretting the faults, incidents and dangers of the "full picture". The preemption of the image is next examined with respect to language, notably the way in which the signifier pre-empts the signified and comes to view as an image free from meaning and reference. Lastly, the preemption of the image is analyzed in its relationship to nature. Delillo's characters seem to want to discover a nature undetermined by man. However, our ability to discern the natural is vitiated by a self-referring element which seeps into events and the self. There is also a "natural" preemption of the image in delillo's work, i. E. The heideggerian readiness-at-hand (zuhandenheit). Delillo's characters want to pierce through the preemption of readiness-at-hand, seize that which lies before them as a "natural" object. Yet this longing for a superhuman perspective is nothing more than the wish to pre-empt whatever is in the heideggerian sense of the image
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Polk, Thomas H. "The rupture of symbolic immortality Don DeLillo and 9/11 /." View electronic thesis (PDF), 2009. http://dl.uncw.edu/etd/2009-1/polkt/thomaspolk.pdf.
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Thorell, Alexander. "Entering the Anthropocene Through the Great American Novel: Dark Ecology in Don DeLillo's Underworld." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Akademin för lärande, humaniora och samhälle, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-33253.
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Spielmacher, Mark. "Technologized subjects in the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0009/NQ32858.pdf.
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Dukes, Hunter. "The signatory imagination : James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Don DeLillo." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/273537.
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This dissertation examines a twentieth-century lineage of writers and poets concerned with signatory inscription. By this, I mean the writing, tracing, branding, embossing, tattooing, or engraving of the name of a person or place onto various kinds of surfaces, as well as other forms of marking that approximate autography. My contention is that James Joyce's novels demonstrate an explicit, underexplored concern with signature and the different imaginary investments (erotic, legal, preservative) that accompany its presence in the world. In Joyce's wake, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, and Don DeLillo all produce texts that both engage with Joyce's novels and think carefully about the potential of the signature as a material object. My first chapter, 'James Joyce's Signatures', explores how nineteenth-century developments in graphology and forensic identification inherit ideas from the medicinal doctrine of signatures. I argue that this expanded sense of signature offers a unique perspective on Joyce's taxonomic representation, which questions the boundaries between a body of text and (non)human bodies. The presence of legal trials in Ulysses adds a forensic element to Joyce's signatory imagination. This element is taken to its logical extreme in 'Nausicaa', where scents, sounds, and impressions become bodily, as opposed to alphabetical, signatures - produced by humans, waves, and stones. The second chapter, 'Samuel Beckett and the Endurance of Names', continues this line of argument, showing how Beckett inherits Joyce's interest in autographic inscription, but employs it for different ends. While the epitaphic tradition relies upon hard materials such as stone and metal to preserve lettering, Beckett's interest in excrement ('First Love') and mud (How It Is) remaps inscription onto immanence. Rather than seeking immortality through lithic preservation, Beckett's characters yearn to 'return to the mineral state', to have their bodies subsumed and dispersed throughout a greater container. The third chapter, 'Seamus Heaney and the Phonetics of Place', turns from the signature of persons to the signature of places, from prose to poetry. Explicitly glossing poems like 'Anahorish', 'Toome', and 'Broagh' as inspired by Stephen Dedalus, Heaney performs a critical repatriation of Joyce's work. Joyce uses fictional, motivated relations between names and referents to construct a linguistic correlative for Stephen's youthful naivety - a technique that personalises his lexicon, privileging Stephen's own associations over those of nationality, language, or religion. Heaney, on the other hand, politicises this process, utilising phonetic association to forge imaginary correspondences between Irish place-names and the people and places they denote. The final chapter, 'Don DeLillo, Encryption, and Writing Technologies', examines the novels of Don DeLillo and his interest in signatory technologies. Drawing upon archival research conducted on the manuscripts of Americana, Ratner's Star and The Names, I show that Joyce influenced the composition of these texts to a greater extent than previously thought. In particular, DeLillo uses Joyce to think through the technological dimensions of writing, comparing older methods of inscription like boustrophedon to modern communication technologies via Ulysses.
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Tréguer, Florian. "L'espace critique de la représentation dans l'oeuvre romanesque de Don DeLillo." Rennes 2, 1999. http://www.theses.fr/1999REN20010.
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Cette étude se donne pour objet de définir, de circonscrire et d'analyser les étapes critiques qui marquent la progression dialectique des romans de Don Delillo - ces moments ou la représentation est mise en crise, où elle se recadre a la faveur de ruptures et de retours, redéfinit les agencements sémantiques qu'elle a opérés jusque là. Le lieu du récit ou se produit l'événement de la crise (l'écart, la non coïncidence, la différence dans la répétition) est l'occasion répétée pour le romancier de loger un commentaire. Les crises déterminent de la sorte autant de brèches dans l'édifice diégétique par lesquelles la narration fait entendre un discours différentiel. Plus loin, l'espace de la crise plurielle devient espace critique du texte qui développe concurremment son propre versant analytique, dédoublant ainsi la nature de ses enjeux la première partie s'attache a montrer comment l'épreuve de la crise par les personnages (crise identitaire, crise du voir, de la nomination, du nom propre, crise aussi du signe linguistique ou iconique, par rupture de la transaction sémantique) fonctionne toujours comme un principe de délimitation et de cadrage de leur environnement autant qu'elle permet au roman de questionner les frontières de son propre espace de représentation. L'oeuvre se développe ainsi à partir d'un examen épistémologique des modèles d'appréhension du réel, des modes perceptifs et conditions de la perspective, comme d'une interrogation sur le langage. La deuxième partie tente de cerner cet autre moment du roman ou les enjeux de l'intrigue sont reformulés, les éléments de la semiosis refigurés. La démarche d'ensemble tient alors de la confrontation : le sens du récit se fait dans l'espace déterminant d'un champ contre champ. D'une part, les régimes de signes isoles dans un premier temps sont reterritorialisés, entrent dans de nouvelles perspectives critiques par la mise en abyme (modèle récurrent du complot) ou bien à travers l'exploitation extensive de l'image (iconique, picturale, télévisuelle) dont l'ordre représentationnel, voire simulacral, tend a se substituer a l'ordre du monde référentiel. D'autre part, les romans fondent un incessant décadrage de la lecture et une révision de la mimesis à partir de jeux metatextuels, de la citation intertextuelle ou encore de la répétition ironiqueThe goal of this work is to define, to circumscribe and analyze the critical stages that mark the dialectical progression of Delillo's novels, that is, instances where representation is questioned, where it fails and gives way to breaks and returns, redefining the semantical agencies that it had performed up to that point. The narrative site where the crisis (breaks, non-coincidence or correspondence, difference in repetition, etc. ) Takes place provides numerous opportunities for the novelist to comment in his fashion. In this way, the crises form a number of breaches in the diegetic edifice through which the narration is able to speak in a differential discourse. Furthermore, the space in which the multiple crises take place becomes a critical one for the text which develops in conjunction with its own analytic side and thus doubles the nature of its stakes. The first part of the work attempts to show how the event of the crisis as revealed through characters (the crisis of identity, of seeing, of naming, of proper names, the crisis of the sign too, through the breakdown in the semantic transaction) always functions as a principle of demarcation and of framing of their environment just as it allows the novel to place its own boudaries of representation into question. The work thus develops from an epistemological examination of models of apprehension of the real, of perceptive modes and conditions of perspectives as from a questioning of language. The second part of this work endeavours to determine the other moment in the novel where the stakes of the intrigue are reformulated and the elements of the semiosis are reconfigured. The reasoning of the ensemble of the work is based then on confrontation: the sense of the narration emerges in the determining space of a 'field of play versus play of field' confrontation. On the one hand, the regimes of signs are first reterritorialized and enter into new critical perspectives through the recurrent myse en abyme of the plot (conspiracy theme) or else through the exploitation of the image (iconic, pictural, televisual) whose representational, or even simalacral, order tends to take the place of the order of the referential world. On the other hand, the novels ground an incessant un-framing of reading and a revision of mimesis through metatextual games, intertextual quotations or ironic repetition
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Baldwin, Adam David. "The motel in the heart of every man : the transitional spaces of Don DeLillo." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2015. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/54444/.
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This work illustrates the spatial nature of Don DeLillo's writing. Through a reading of his work a network of societal spaces repeatedly occur and are utilised as locations within which to raise questions of the relationship between identity and mass society. The spaces that predominate produce the topography of his work. A network begins to develop, a series of nodal points joined by a connective tissue of pathways through which the discussion of society and identity pass. By focusing on both the nodal points themselves and the pathways that connect them the roles of motion, control and a potential counter-narrative appear. The individual spaces that DeLillo chooses as locations in his novels are relevant. Their placing in society, their means of construction and the materials of which they are constituted all illustrate the form of society which created them. In turn these spaces are observed to shape the characters that pass through them, in the process further expanding the network of societal associations. The particular spatial forms that DeLillo focuses on reflect a transitional impulse, a desire for motion and speed rooted in anti-historicism. The suburb, the motel, and the highway are all born of the period which followed the Second World War which had a profound sociological, psychological and technological impact on society. The need to face the future, reject the past and repress the traumatic experiences of war led an experience of space and society which is transitional. The spaces are selected for their association with anxiety, trauma, nostalgia and consumption. The duality of these spaces epitomises the complexities of modern social identity. Due to the reflexive nature of transitionality cultural shifts impact upon its form, altering the way in which it appears and functions. The alleyway influences the development of the highway, the motel influences the development of the suburb, and the railway station affects the airport. The airport is an example of the manner in which technological advance change the appearance of these spaces but the themes and issues that are explored in them reflect consistent interests. Similarly, moments of great social import such as the Kennedy assassination and the attacks of 9/11 leave traces on these transitional spaces.
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Nagle, Emily. "Ideological catastrophe: political paranoia in the fiction of Philip Roth and Don Delillo." Thesis, Boston University, 2008. https://hdl.handle.net/2144/28580.
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Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses.PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you.
2031-01-02
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Longmuir, Anne. "The search for a political aesthetic in the fiction of Don DeLillo." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/24850.
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This thesis charts the search for an effective political aesthetic in the fiction of Don DeLillo. It examines all twelve of DeLillo’s novels from Americana (1971) to The Body Artist (2001). It argues DeLillo is one of the most important contemporary American writers, precisely because his fiction takes on a culture, that of the United States of America, and engages with geopolitics and history. DeLillo has been accused of apoliticism, but on the contrary this thesis demonstrates that the quest for an effective political aesthetic has been central to DeLillo’s project from the start. DeLillo’s aesthetic, which is often self-consciously enacted through the figure of the artist or writer in his novels, is furthermore set up in opposition to the dominant culture of late twentieth century America. This thesis concurs with Fredric Jameson’s argument that this dominant culture, postmodernism, is the superstructural manifestation of late capitalism. This thesis argues that DeLillo’s position to this culture is dialectical, as he struggles to find a place of resistance from within it. Furthermore, this thesis also argues that DeLillo positions the hope for political resistance with the marginalised, such as women, homosexuals and ethnic groups. It concludes DeLillo finds his solution in a semiotic aesthetic. This aesthetic, springing in part from the subject’s own body, is not entirely predetermined by the pre-existing narrative of the dominant culture, thereby restoring the individual speaking subject to some extent. However, this thesis argues that DeLillo also recognises the capacity of the dominant culture to continually reabsorb any transgression, hence it is only in an avant-garde art - one that can continually “make it new” - that any real hope for political resistance lies. Crucially, DeLillo plays this out in his own aesthetic by continually adopting different discourses and even in the case of The Body Artist producing a difficult and deliberately unpopular text. Finally, as his recourse to the avant-garde suggests, this thesis argues that it is wrong to regard DeLillo as an “exemplary postmodernist” as many, including Martin Amis do, concluding that this work is characterised by a strong modernist impulse.
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Ebbesen, Jeffrey. "Postmodernism and its others : the fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo /." New York : Routledge, 2006. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb401448835.
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Dell, Kerstin. "The family novel in North America from post-war to post-millennium a study in genre." Saarbrücken VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2005. http://d-nb.info/987144782/04.
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Hantke, Steffen. "Conspiracy and paranoia in contemporary American fiction : the works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy." Frankfurt am Main ; Bern ; New York : P. Lang, 1994. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb376145796.
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Gordon, Angus. "The nuclear threat : family, ideology and postmodernity in Don DeLillo and David Leavitt /." Title page, contents and introduction only, 1993. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09AR/09arg662.pdf.
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Ribeiro, Rejane de Almeida [UNESP]. "O pós-moderno e a relação entre literatura e história em Running dog, de Don Delillo." Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/99113.
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ribeiro_ra_me_sjrp.pdf: 445246 bytes, checksum: 62f8cef13de473ce4ad941026749cfc4 (MD5)A partir de teorias sobre o pós-moderno e sobre as relações entre Literatura e História, realiza-se a análise da obra Running Dog (1978), do autor norte-americano Don DeLillo, a fim de verificar quais elementos históricos, culturais, sociais e políticos estão presentes na narrativa. Aborda-se também como esses aspectos são estruturados de maneira estética, ou seja, qual é o projeto ficcional do autor. O romance traz uma busca por um filme supostamente pornográfico que teria Hitler como uma de suas personagens. Na verdade, quando o filme é encontrado, vemos o líder nazista frágil, debilitado, imitando Charlie Chaplin em O Grande Ditador (1940), revelando, assim, uma outra imagem do Führer. O trabalho apresenta uma discussão sobre a postura crítica do autor frente à História oficial, bem como à cultura contemporânea.
This thesis presents an analysis of the novel Running Dog (1978), by Don DeLillo, based on theories that focus on postmodern issues, Literature and History, in order to verify which historical, social and political elements are aproached in the book. It is discussed how these aspects are aesthetically structured, that is, what the author's fictional project is. The narrative shows the search for an alleged pornographic film that would have Hitler as one of its characters. In fact, when the film is found, we see a debilitated, fragile Nazi leader, imitating Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940). Thus, the author discloses another image of the Führer. This study also addresses DeLillo's criticism towards official History and contemporary culture.
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Ribeiro, Rejane de Almeida. "O pós-moderno e a relação entre literatura e história em "Running dog", de Don Delillo /." São José do Rio Preto : [s.n.], 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/99113.
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Orientador: Giséle Manganelli FernandesBanca: Paulo Sérgio Nolasco dos Santos
Banca: Álvaro Luiz Hattnher
Resumo: A partir de teorias sobre o pós-moderno e sobre as relações entre Literatura e História, realiza-se a análise da obra Running Dog (1978), do autor norte-americano Don DeLillo, a fim de verificar quais elementos históricos, culturais, sociais e políticos estão presentes na narrativa. Aborda-se também como esses aspectos são estruturados de maneira estética, ou seja, qual é o projeto ficcional do autor. O romance traz uma busca por um filme supostamente pornográfico que teria Hitler como uma de suas personagens. Na verdade, quando o filme é encontrado, vemos o líder nazista frágil, debilitado, imitando Charlie Chaplin em O Grande Ditador (1940), revelando, assim, uma outra imagem do Führer. O trabalho apresenta uma discussão sobre a postura crítica do autor frente à História oficial, bem como à cultura contemporânea.
Abstract: This thesis presents an analysis of the novel Running Dog (1978), by Don DeLillo, based on theories that focus on postmodern issues, Literature and History, in order to verify which historical, social and political elements are aproached in the book. It is discussed how these aspects are aesthetically structured, that is, what the author's fictional project is. The narrative shows the search for an alleged pornographic film that would have Hitler as one of its characters. In fact, when the film is found, we see a debilitated, fragile Nazi leader, imitating Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940). Thus, the author discloses another image of the Führer. This study also addresses DeLillo's criticism towards official History and contemporary culture.
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Smith, Aaron. ""Primal Joy and Primitive Control" : les phénomènes énumératifs dans les romans de Don DeLillo." Pau, 2002. http://www.theses.fr/2002PAUU1006.
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L'usage des listes dans les romans de Don DeLillo est ici analysé d'un point de vue rhétorique. La synthèse critique des travaux existants permet de définir la liste comme un parallélisme paradigmatique. Les "listes-inventaire" permettent à Don DeLillo d'exprimer la surenchère sémiologique à l'origine d'une crise herméneutique chez les personnages, crise qu'ils tentent de résoudre en instrumentalisant le langage pour ordonner leur existence. De la résistance du langage à se laisser investir d'un sens fixe résulte les "listes hétérologiques", dans lesquelles la polyphonie du langage est mise en avant. Dans les romans de Don DeLillo existe une tension entre deux conceptions de l'histoire et de la narration que l'on retrouve dans les "listes-récit". Tout en imposant une logique d'ensemble à la narration, ces listes montrent la nature disparate des évènements qui la composent. Les "listes-archétype" permettent de mettre en question la notion d'expérience authentiqueDon DeLillo's use of lists is analysed here from a rhetorical perspective. A critical reading of existing works on the subject leads to a definition of the list as a paradigmatic parallelism. "Inventory lists" allow DeLillo to give voice to the semiotic frenzy present in the universe of his novels. This frenzy is at the origin of the characters' epistemological crises, crises they try to resolve by instrumentalising enumerative language as a tool for ordering their existence. Language's resistance to being invested with a stable and authoritative meaning result in "heteroglossic lists", where the polyphony of language is foregrounded. Tension in DeLillo's novels between two opposing conceptions of history and narration is most visible in "narrative lists". Narrative lists show the disparate nature of narrative moments while at the same time uniting them in a common logic. Finally, "archetype lists" destabilise the idea of authentic experience in DeLillo's novels
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Theilen, Ines. "White Hum - literarische Synästhesie in der zeitgenössischen Literatur." Berlin Frank & Timme, 2007. http://d-nb.info/988406047/04.
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Baker, Stephen. "The fiction of postmodernity : dialectical studies of Martin Amis, Don DeLillo and Salman Rushdie." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/26198.
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This thesis is a dialectical study of fiction by Martin Amis, Don DeLillo and Salman Rushdie. It situates novels by these three writers in relation to a Western Marxist theoretical understanding of the postmodern and the culture of postmodernity, particularly as developed in the writings of Fredric Jameson. While the thesis is intended to demonstrate how such theoretical accounts help illuminate interpretation of contemporary, postmodern fiction, it also suggests how that fiction might provide a critique, or expose the limitations, of those theoretical or conceptual models themselves. The thesis traces, in selected examples of Amis's, DeLillo's and Rushdie's fiction, elements of dialectical conflict. It describes the means by which the texts enact simultaneously a form of ideological complicity with what Jameson (following the economist Ernest Mandel) calls 'late capitalism' and a measure of social and cultural critique. It is with this identification of both the ideological and the critical features of postmodern fiction that the thesis is principally concerned. Chapter one charts a Western Marxist model of transition from modernism to postmodernism both through the theoretical writings of Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson and through brief studies of examples of modernist and late-modernist fiction. It concludes with an acknowledgement of the difficulties Western Marxist aesthetics have had in identifying any critical potential in postmodern culture. Nonetheless, the literary studies which succeed chapter one offer lengthy insistence that a properly Marxian analysis must attempt to identify both the affirmative and the critical moments of cultural commodities. This is a step which, with regard to postmodern texts, Western Marxist critics have thus far been reluctant to take.
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Pass, Phillip. "'[T]he language of self' : strategies of subjectivity in the novels of Don DeLillo." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3148.
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‘[T]he language of self': Strategies of Subjectivity in the Novels of Don DeLillo' explores the manner in which both self and society are constructed in the writer's longer fiction. Divided into two sections, the first, entitled Dasein, examines the way in which the language of self forms a Mobius strip comprised of two opposing yet omnipresent urges: that of connection and isolation. Coining the term enunciation, the thesis describes the manner in which each character's subjectivity is an historically contingent attempt at negotiating this tension between isolation and connection, self and other. The second section of the thesis, entitled 'das Man', then proceeds to explore the impact of this language of self within a wider social context, examining the manner in which it interacts with other linguistic and quasi-linguistic binaries – such as language, image, capital, waste, power and terror – likewise characterised as adopting the form of a Mobius strip. Through such a methodology, the second section of the thesis is thus able to explore the interaction and shared genesis of public and private conceptions of subjectivity, illustrating how it is this same tension between connection and isolation which governs the form that social interactions and institutions adopt in the novels of Don DeLillo.
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Wright, Nicholas Joshua Thomas. "Tendering the Impossible: The Work of Irony in the Late Novels of Don DeLillo." Thesis, University of Canterbury. English, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/932.
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The following thesis represents an attempt to account for the novelist Don DeLillo's last three novels (Underworld (1999), The Body Artist (2001), and Cosmopolis (2003)) through the examination of what I conceive as DeLillo's philosophy of language. It is my assertion that the crucial and articulating aspect of DeLillo's philosophy of language is his investment in, and investigation of, irony. As I argue, DeLillo's novels presume a certain conjugation of what I refer to as the work of irony (the seemingly impossible work of tendering both the allegorical imperative of naming and the ironic imperative of Otherness) with the work of art. In other words, DeLillo's theory of language reveals his theory of art and, thus, his own theory of writing. This aesthetic philosophy becomes the critical tool with which DeLillo evaluates the various symbolic economies of a culture and its individuals caught within late capitalism. The impossibility of defining irony becomes, for DeLillo, a metaphor by which to understand language itself as what I refer to as a fallen and tender economy, constituted by an Otherness, which language can only tender. In his novels, DeLillo, I argue, suggests that language and subjectivity ought to be conceived of as forms of a faith in an Otherness, impossible to represent as such, to which all speech, violence, art, commodity and reproduction are indebted, and which we may mourn and represent - as we must - more or less faithfully, more or less blindly, and, by virtue of irony, more or less tenderly. The possibilities of faith and the ethical in art and representation, thus, for DeLillo, arise through an attention to an Otherness that can only be tendered through the very tenderness (fallenness, profanity, weakness) of allegory and language. To understand this is to understand the role of irony in DeLillo's philosophy, and also to understand DeLillo's profound commitment to language, his renovation of allegory through its mortification by irony and, thus, its remembering and mourning of Otherness. In this regard, DeLillo shares much with the melancholia of deconstruction as evinced within the language philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, in particular, Derrida's economic consideration, differance, and his notion of the work of mourning, both of which, I argue, offer the reader of DeLillo's texts ways of tendering the work of irony.
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Silva, Rui Miguel Mesquita Fernandes. "Para lá do Pós-Modernismo : a trajectória de Libra na ficção de Don DeLillo." Master's thesis, Porto : [Edição do Autor], 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10216/13051.
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Esta dissertação pretende discutir a existência e a possível relevância de alguns elementos na ficção de Don DeLillo que não podem ser compreendidos dentro de uma estética pós-modernista. Entre esses elementos é dedicada uma atenção especial ao problema da recuperação de um determinado sentido de historicidade no roamnce Libra. Este problema é descrito em conjunção com o conceito de sublime, que a estética pós-modernista problematiza insistentemente e que no romance de DeLillo, é trabalhado no sentido de um "Sublime histórico". Sendo assim, o romance de DeLillo não só contraria o discurso popular contemporâneo de conspiração e paranóia, como também excede a própria natureza a história do romance pó-moderno, pelo que proponho a possibilidade de DeLillo ser um percursor de uma tendência artística a surgir.
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Silva, Rui Miguel Mesquita Fernandes. "Para lá do Pós-Modernismo : a trajectória de Libra na ficção de Don DeLillo." Dissertação, Porto : [Edição do Autor], 2001. http://aleph.letras.up.pt/F?func=find-b&find_code=SYS&request=000118958.
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Esta dissertação pretende discutir a existência e a possível relevância de alguns elementos na ficção de Don DeLillo que não podem ser compreendidos dentro de uma estética pós-modernista. Entre esses elementos é dedicada uma atenção especial ao problema da recuperação de um determinado sentido de historicidade no roamnce Libra. Este problema é descrito em conjunção com o conceito de sublime, que a estética pós-modernista problematiza insistentemente e que no romance de DeLillo, é trabalhado no sentido de um "Sublime histórico". Sendo assim, o romance de DeLillo não só contraria o discurso popular contemporâneo de conspiração e paranóia, como também excede a própria natureza a história do romance pó-moderno, pelo que proponho a possibilidade de DeLillo ser um percursor de uma tendência artística a surgir.
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Pinheiro, Anderson Vitorino. "Entre as ruínas da contranarrativa: a representação da realidade em Homem em queda, de Don DeLillo." Universidade de São Paulo, 2015. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8151/tde-18012016-134527/.
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Esta dissertação investiga os modos de representação da realidade no romance Homem em queda, do norte-americano Don DeLillo. O método utilizado é a análise interpretativa de trechos chaves do romance que possam representar a arquitetura de toda a narrativa, ao modo de Erich Auerbach. Escritos do teórico Fredric Jameson acerca do inconsciente político e da questão temporal na pós-modernidade se somam a teorias de Karl Marx (alienação) e Guy Debord (sociedade do espetáculo) para auxiliar a leitura sócio-histórica do romance.This master\'s thesis investigates the representation of reality in the novel Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The method is the interpretative analysis of key excerpts of the novel which may represent the whole architecture of the narrative, following the steps of Erich Auerbach. Writings by Fredric Jameson about the political unconscious and temporality in postmodernity as the theories of Karl Marx (alienation) and Guy Debord (society of the spectacle) helped us leading a socio-historical reading of the novel.
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O'Brien, Monica. "Bombed-out consciousness the negative teleology of the modern subject in Adorno, Beckett and DeLillo /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3164708.
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Whelan, Ashleigh. "For the Future: An Examination of Conspiracy and Terror in the Works of Don Delillo." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2011. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/104.
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This thesis is divided into two chapters, the first being an examination of conspiracy and paranoia in Libra, while the second focuses on the relationship between art and terror in Mao II, “In the Ruins of the Future,” Falling Man, and Point Omega. The study traces how DeLillo’s works have evolved over the years, focusing on the creation of counternarratives. Readers are given a glimpse of American culture and shown the power of narrative, ultimately shedding light on the future of our collective consciousness.
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Morley, Catherine. "The quest for epic in contemporary American fiction : John Updike, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo." Thesis, Oxford Brookes University, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.427126.
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Muscolino, Stephen J. "Writing in real-time, fictions of digitization : the novels of Don DeLillo and Dave Eggers." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2017. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/8276/.
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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.
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Castellani, Brenda M. ""Once we stop denying death": Fear, Death and the Postmodern Generation in White Noise." University of Toledo Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=uthonors1450431284.
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Sisk, Richard Ronald. ""How this took place he couldn't have said exactly": A stylistic analysis of the prose of Don DeLillo." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1989. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/531.
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Griffin, Brett Thomas. "Can the Wound Be Taken at Its Word?: Performed Trauma in Don DeLillo's The Body Artist and Falling Man." Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University, 2008. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/48/.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008.Title from title page (Digital Archive@GSU, viewed July 20, 2010) Chris Kocela, committee chair; Marilynn Richtarik, Nancy Chase, committee members. Includes bibliographical references (p. 82-86).
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Da, Cunha Lewin Katherine. "The reconnoiter inward : interiority and spatial aesthetics in the novels of Don DeLillo and J.M. Coetzee." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2018. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/77286/.
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Johnson, Jennifer Camille. "Body Politics in Don DeLillo, Adrienne Rich, and Andy Warhol: A Study in Postmodern American Culture." NCSU, 2007. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-03282007-104816/.
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For many postmodern artists, such as Don DeLillo, Adrienne Rich, and Andy Warhol, the human body and identity are constantly challenged, refigured, and re-envisioned. In this thesis, I explore to what extent each of these artists depicts the human body as disempowered or empowered in postmodern American culture. In Chapter One, ?Technology, Death, and Identity in Don DeLillo?s White Noise,? I examine the ways in which White Noise explores the nexus between the body, pop culture, fear, and death. In Chapter Two, ?Adrienne Rich: Toward an Embodied Poetics,? I explore the shifts in emphasis throughout most of Rich?s poetry and how she explores the fate of the female body in a capitalist, patriarchal society. In Chapter Three, ?The Visual Art of Andy Warhol: Fame, Death, and Disaster in American Popular Culture,? I investigate how Warhol explores the human body as image and surface that lack depth or inherent meaning and human identity as a façade manufactured by American culture. In the ?Concluding Remarks,? I discuss the relationship between genre and each artist?s perspectives of the body while also exploring each artist?s conclusions about the empowerment and disempowerment of the human body in postmodern American culture.
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Parker, Melanie Suzanne. "Postmodernism and Cold War military technology in the fiction of Don DeLillo and William S. Burroughs." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2009. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3642/.
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This thesis explores Don DeLillo's and William S. Burroughs' ongoing fictional engagements with the intimacy between Cold War military technology and postmodern networked culture. These novelists respond from seemingly divergent perspectives to the social and historiographical uncertainty generated by networked militarization. For DeLillo, this takes the form of a neo-realist narrative reconsideration of history, designed to emphasise the effects of the Cold War unconscious propagated by the speed and dissemination of cultural data. Burroughs' response takes the form of a counter-assault designed to overthrow and replace the 'control machinery' operating through the military-technological information system.
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Fahim, Abeer Abdel Raouf. "Redeeming the betrayed body : technology and embodiment in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo." Thesis, Durham University, 2012. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3494/.
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This thesis presents a reading of the fiction of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon that focuses on the significance of embodiment in the authors’ technologically mediated worlds. The study draws upon the work of Vivian Sobchack, Steven Connor, Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Critics of DeLillo and Pynchon’s fiction have generally avoided phenomenological perspectives; as a result, the concept of corporeality has not been thoroughly examined. Thus, the thesis examines the fiction of Pynchon and DeLillo in light of theories of embodiment that have been overlooked. Central to the thesis is a study of the theoretical and technical aspects of visual and auditory technology that is focused on how the authors depict an intrinsic connection between the physical body and prosthetics. To subvert the conventional dichotomy between the human and the technological, the thesis explores the sensory experiences of the characters, drawing attention to the inextricable connection between the body and the world. The analysis also considers the significance of the unity of the senses and the connection this has to the manner in which the body’s materiality is depicted. Moreover, the concept of monstrosity is used to explore how the authors portray the fluidity and the multiplicity of the human body. Giving a close reading of the body’s inherent connection to technology and the prominence of materiality, the thesis suggests that the characters depict subjective experiences that are rooted in their physicality. Technology is not perceived, in its conventional sense, as a means of disembodying the characters; on the contrary, it is the gateway to exploring corporeality.
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Burn, Stephen J. ""At the edges of perception" : William Gaddis and the encyclopedic novel from Joyce to David Foster Wallace." Thesis, Durham University, 2001. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4235/.
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"Longer works of fiction," a character in William Gaddis's JR complains of the current literary scene, are now "dismissed as classics and remain . . . largely unread due to the effort involved in reading and turning any more than two hundred pages" (527). This study argues that despite most literary critics constructing American postmodernism as a movement that privileges short works, in contrast to the encyclopedic masterworks of modernism, there are in fact a large number of artistically sophisticated contemporary novels of encyclopedic scope that demonstrate often ignored lines of continuity from works like James Joyce's Ulysses. In arguing this, I attempt not just to draw attention to a neglected strain in contemporary American fiction, but also to provide a more accurate context in which those few recent encyclopedic novels that have assumed centrality, like Gravity's Rainbow, might be evaluated. In doing so, this thesis also seeks to demonstrate the pivotal position of William Gaddis who, despite publishing four impressive novels that engage with the legacy of modernism and pre-empt elements of postmodernism, has been excluded from most studies dealing with the transition between the two movements. Through detailed readings of four encyclopedic novels - Gaddis's The Recognitions, Don DeLillo's Underworld, Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest - I show Gaddis's continuation of encyclopedic modernism, the importance of his example to later writers, and the continuing vitality of the encyclopedic novel beyond the defined limits of modernism. However, as these novels try to encompass the full circle of knowledge, in order to do justice to their diverse learning I have adopted a different approach in each chapter. Very broadly, they attempt to encircle art, psychology, science, and literature, which, taken together, attempt to synthesise a defence of the contemporary encyclopedic novel. While minimalist writers from Raymond Carver to Ann Beattie have affirmed that less is more, this thesis argues that, in some cases, more really is more.
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Ross, Ronald J. III. "The Pragmatist Canon: Rethinking Literature in the Classroom." Wittenberg University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wuhonors1242224971.
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Link, Peter Charles. "?LIFE AFTER DEATH GUARANTEED WITH BONUS COUPONS?: SEDUCTION,TYRANNY, AND MASS CULTURE IN DON DELILLO?S FICTION." NCSU, 2000. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-20000107-153024.
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The purpose of this thesis is to study the viability of individuality in a fast-paced, consumer-driven, late capitalist society in light of Don DeLillo?s White Noise (1984) and Mao II (1991). One way of considering American late capitalism is to treat it as a mass movement with striking similarities to more overtly tyrannical mass movements like Nazism and Mooneyism. DeLillo makes such comparisons in White Noise and Mao II, and his fiction ultimately suggests that an unchecked late capitalist consumer culture is frighteningly capable of not only tyranny, but also of liquidating individuality. A more acute analysis of the methodology employed by mass movements can be made using a Frankfurt School approach. Theodor Adorno?s essay, ?Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,? offers a useful framework for studying how mass movements are able to seduce, manipulate, tyrannize, and incorporate individuals. Adorno argues that Nazism depended on knowledge of certain psychological desires to seduce individuals. This essay argues that the American consumer culture uses similar methods to seduce individuals by not only employing psychological weapons, but also by taking advantage of a highly systemetized technological apparatus whose development has coincided with the unprecedented rise of the American consumer culture.
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Price, David. "The space of the page in the writing of Don DeLillo, or the writer as advanced-artist." Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.551156.
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What happens when fiction is considered as a space for art, and when art is considered as a space for fiction? This thesis addresses these questions through a practice-led study of the fictional writings of Don DeLillo. DeLillo has been publishing novels since 1971, each of which have engaged with aspects of art production and art criticism. The formal implications of this have played a polarising role in the criticism that has gathered around his work, with some critics reading DeLillo's fictional artworks as evidence of a highly post-modem and plural production, whilst others have seen these works as more modernist reflections on the writing process. In this thesis propose that by reading DeLillo's writing through the art-historical oeuvre of Thomas Crow, and his notion of the 'advanced-artwork', that a new model of practice can be defined, where writing becomes the site for the production of visual art, and visual art becomes the site for writing. The 'advanced-artwork', according to Crow is formed by multiple practices that operate within a single work, and incorporates elements of critical thought within its physical production - qualities in DeLillo's fiction that have energised his critics, but have yet to be analysed using an analogous model from another field. After a review of the aspects of DeLillo criticism that that set the ground for these questions, and a parallel review of Crow's art-historical writings, I address the potential for synthesising these areas on two fronts. Firstly, by a detailed study of DeLillo's 1988 novel Libra, reading it through art-theory and proposing that the novel fulfils many of the criteria of the advanced-artwork, as well as showing how this reading allows many of the problematic questions in existing DeLillo criticism to be addressed. My second means of approaching Libra in these terms is the practical component of my thesis. This takes the form of a vi sual artwork made up of wri ting, produced in response to an archive ofDeLillo's drafts and working papers. Using a manual typewriter, like DeLillo himself, I reproduce successive drafts of sections of the novel that are conceptually related to the questions that in the rest of the thesis I have addressed in theoretical terms. In using this dual method of questioning of art's potential relationship to writing, I have attempted to use the work of a single author to reflect on the possibilities of writing as a medium for contemporary art-practice, and the potential of art to become a site of literary criticism. But by grounding my critique of DeLillo's fiction in the raw materials of the medium I have also attempted to question the space of the page in wider terms, as an expansive site of inter-disciplinary practice that allows its component parts to be set in critical discourse.
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Santin, Bryan Michael. "REPRESENTING THE TRAUMA OF 9/11 IN U.S. FICTION: JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER, DON DELILLO AND JESS WALTER." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1313527497.
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