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An Analysis of Don Delillo's Powerful Imaginings, the Atmosphere of the Individual Implicated in the Postmodern Condition

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An Analysis of Don Delillo's Powerful Imaginings, the Atmosphere of the Individual Implicated in the Postmodern Condition INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been mpmducd from fhe micrdibn master- UMI films the text dimfrom th original or copy urknitbd. Thus, some Wsand dissertation copies; are in typmMw face, while dhem may be from any type d computer printer. The quality of this rwpmduction is depondont upon the qullity of th. copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, ahred or po~fquality illustrations and photqraphs, print bkedthrough, substandad margins, and improper alignment can adVBC58(Y affect Feprodudon. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMl a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unautho- copyright material had to be removed, a note will indiithe deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, cham) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand wmer and mtinuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Photographs included in the original manuscript have b8en reprodud xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6= x W Mack and white photographic prints are available for my photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI dimto order. Be11 & Howell information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 4810&1346 USA 800-521-0600 An Analysis of Don Demo's Powerfd Imaginings: The Atmosphere of the Individual Implicated in the Postmodern Condition Janet H.L. Hicks A thesis submitted in contormity with the requirements For the degree of Master of Arts Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto 0 Copyright by Janet H.L. Hicks 1999 National Library Bibliith4que nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. nre Wellington OttawaON K1AON4 0&lrwaON K1AON4 Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pennettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, preter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique . The author retains ownership of the L'auteur consewe la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent 6eimphes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. htcrof tW, 1999 Janet W.L. Hicks Department of &iology and Equity Studies in Education University of Toronto ABSTRACT An Analysis of Don DeLillo's Powerful Imaginings: The Atmosphere of the Individual Implicated in the Postmodern Condition Don DeUo distills common premises about the postmodem era - about the way public and private experience tend to be 'always ready" constikted or bedby language, by the intrusions of mass media, by the subtemean ideologies of a decentered network of apocalypse and a painful awareness of the devastation of the natural world. DeLillo, accepting the selfs implication in postmodern noise" the residue of a 'f=rmiiiarD human awamness of death. More than merely working out the writer's stxategy of sell, this thesis, by examining three of his novels, will make judgements about the success or failure of the strategies as convincing constructs in the context of the novels. n Introduction Familiar Mysteries a End Zone a The Names White Noise a Conclusion References iii Introduction This thesis is about what I think a particular American novelist is telling us about how to survive in the contemporary era. The "self' as a literary entity is supposed to be dead, and a certain kind of self doubtlessly is-& least the kind tbat sets the world as a passive landscape against which he can work out his private dcstiny. It's more or less impossible to read anyone who believes in such a self anymo~rt(Ayn Rand, for exampleL)-ndy as impossible as it is to believe that real-Me Randian figures like Mic~~Miken or Doaald Trusnp actually roam the earth. That the --a condition in which capitalism and mass media mmbine to saturate physical pnd ideological spas, leaving little or m sjmcc left for the enclaves of Nature or Free Consciousness-is an intrusive, potentially determinative force on the individual is indisputatde. That worrds 4phrases like "freedom," "unitary d~"Usdf4kamhtion,w"cboid and the like art dismissed by caatcmpaary critical dhccmsc as archaic delusions is equally obvious. But then again novd&+prticulruiy American novelists-arw't as quick to jump onto theoretical bandwagom from the Continent as critics uc. For kcter or worse.tbey continut to deal with pheoomendogical, subjective coasciousnes what it feels like to operate inside a mind that experiences the world as Orher. For all the talk of "intcrsubjectivity," "transpersonality," "circdation,"ctc.4e buznrvds tbat herald the pststnrduralist revolution of consciousness-American novelists am still telling us that, exapt for those epiphanic moments when we feel we break fw fmm subjectivity, we am still stuck with ' See AY~Rand: A Sense of l.ife,The movie and the companion book (by Michael Paxton) that document her lire and work (Copyright 1997, AG Media Corporation. Produced, wrltten and directed by Michael Paxton. Narrated by Sharon Gless. Edlted by Lauren Schafler). our measly, alienated selves, and that given this state of things, we need strategies to help us cope. I chose the writer I'll discuss in this study-Don DeLillo-for two reasons. One is that he has a highly developed macrocosmic vision of the postmodern world, an intense imaginative interest not just in the local problems of the individual, family, and community, but in the massive forms of power that affect the individual in ways he senses only vaguely and mysteriously. A second reason is that he grounds his work in a passionate concern for how the individual makes out in such a wodd. Don DeLillo is interested, in other words, in exploring strategies of self in the postmodem era? I can see that some discussion of terminology is needed here, mostly because the words "postmodern" and "self" have for some time been minotaurs inside labyrinths all their own. drawing the attention of some of the weightiest thinkers of our time. Let me begin with the term "postmodem." The literature on the nature of thc postmodem is already vast, so I'd like to enter the discussion in a specialized way--in terns of how the postmodem. as a dominant cultd condition. affects the individual? (I will avoid, at least for now. any A note on usage. By 'individual,' I mean simply 'human being' or 'person, ' and mean to imply nothing about the constitution or ontological Integrity of that Individual, I have decided agalnst the frequent used 'sub]ect,' mainIy because it implies much too strongly that the individual is subject-& something--ideology, power, culture, language--an imp1ication which I think is accepted too easily today. The idea that the individual is completely subject to or constituted by forces outside itself is pervasive among contemporary theorists, but novelists, even those most attuned to the postmodern era, find that the forces which influence us do so incompletely, or at any rate the extent of their influence is unknowable, and so the novel ist tends to trust, much more than a theorist would, their Intimations that freedom from constitution can and does exist. By the word 'self,' I mean something quite different, obviously, and it really won't do to define it here (I will explore it later in this section) except to say that it does imply the possibility of origin, free agency, or 'soul ' that the term 'subject' forecloses. I'm not going to argue here that the self in fact 'exists' In the writings of Don DeLlllo, that I will explore, only that this novelist wants to keep open the question of the self's exlstence as a way or exploring vIta I concerns--transcendence, spirituali ty, plenitude, love--that the novelist finds it impossible to Ignore. ' When I say that the postmodern is a 'dominant cultural condition,' I am description of postmodemism as an artistic style4) I'm particularly interested in this since the very concept of "man," "self," and "transcendental ego" has been one of the central objects of attack by poststructuralist theorists. t t's common now to accept the notion of the "death of the subject" or the "death of the author," but what Foucault, Demda. and Barthes have called for, obviously, isn't the death of man but the death of a particular idea of man: one which, as Foucault puts it, "gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity-which, in short, leads to a transcendental cons~iousness.~ By the term "postmodem," then, I mean to indicate a cultural condition, beginning in the U.S. sometime in the mid-1960's (possibly as early as the nationwide television experience of the Kennedy assassination6) when discourse evolved to the point where it using 'dominant' the way Roman Jacobson used St, as an umbrella term that enables us to descrlbe various phenomena, I don't mean to reify the term 'postmodern' In any way, especially since the novelist I will discuss here rarely if ever uses the term 'postmodern' himself. (Cf, Roman Jacobson, 'The Dominant,' Readinas in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views,ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, [Cambridge: HIT Press, 1 97 11 PP.
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