A Study of Postmodern Element Intertextuality in Don Delillo's Libra
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Living and Writing on the Edge in Don Delillo's Libra
LIVING AND WRITING ON THE EDGE IN DON DELILLO’S LIBRA RALUCA LUCIA CÎMPEAN* Abstract More than fifty years after his tragic death, John F. Kennedy continues to fascinate and incite the interest of a large public. The American Camelot endures, despite numerous and various revisionist historiography evaluations of JFK’s presidency and personal life. Conspiracy thinking underlies both the idealistic and the unflattering views of the Kennedy image and has proved to be a considerable factor in the proliferation of this cultural construct. However, very little has been written on the psychological, social and cultural mechanism which keeps the JFK flame burning. Don DeLillo is the only American novelist who transcends the mere sensationalist side of the Kennedy assassination toward a personal, yet historically informed, fictional analysis of November 22nd 1963 and its aftermath, in his 1988 novel Libra. Keywords John F. Kennedy, historiography, truth, revisionism, conspiracy thinking, imagination, public opinion, Modernism vs. Postmodernism. For over half a century, John F. Kennedy’s memory has been the subject of numerous inquiries, historical and fictional, and has attracted a great amount of controversy, which only speaks of the wide interest in possibly the most iconic American public figure to date. Few have attempted to understand and further explain this popular fascination with the Kennedy image and even fewer have interrogated its roots and the forces which propelled the 35th president of the United States to mythological status. Don DeLillo is the only American novelist who has tackled the Kennedy assassination beyond the readily available sensationalist angle and with the end in view to expose the intricate process of mythmaking and the role of the imagination and personal representation for individual and national narratives. -
Ordinary Madness: Don Delillo's Subject from Underworld to Point Omega
Ordinary Madness: Don DeLillo’s Subject from Underworld to Point Omega Alexander Dunst ABSTRACT This article contends that Don DeLillo’s novels from Underworld to Point Omega are cen- trally concerned with changes in the structure of subjectivity under contemporary capitalism. The essay analyzes these developments from a late Lacanian perspective: as a shift from a dominant neurosis to what Jacques-Alain Miller has called “ordinary psychosis”. Over the years, a few of DeLillo’s critics have problematized a standard account of his characters as postmodern, sug- gesting that the author was in the process of crafting “a new kind of subjectivity”. However, none of these scholars have taken the prominence of psychotic protagonists in his novels as a starting point to analyze DeLillo’s fiction. Madness thus plays an important but overlooked role in the author’s oeuvre. After briefly considering DeLillo’s earlier writing, the discussion concentrates on three representative novels: Underworld, The Body Artist and Point Omega. Where Under- world focuses on paranoia, The Body Artist moves ordinary psychosis to the center of DeLillo’s imagination, a development whose social impact is explored further in the final novel. The article counters traditional conceptions of insanity as irrational and pathological with an emphasis on the structural role madness plays in DeLillo. This reassessment counters a critical tradition that often views insanity as a sign of deep-seated illness, or opposes pathology by naively romanticizing it. The conclusion situates the analysis in the broader framework of the medical humanities. Point Omega, Don DeLillo’s latest novel, is haunted by the breakdown of social relations.1 Framed by the evocation of Douglas Gordon’s video 24 Hour Psycho, the book follows Richard Elster, a retired intellectual hired to provide justification for the Iraq War (28). -
Mao II Ebook
MAO II PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Don DeLillo | 256 pages | 01 Jun 2016 | Pan MacMillan | 9781509837847 | English | London, United Kingdom Mao II PDF Book One day, he lets himself be photographed like Salinger it made him popular until he becomes involved as a spokesperson for a Swiss writer being held hostage in Beirut. All rights reserved. Throw in a clairvoyant woman, a terrorist plot, and a brilliantly realized set piece about a mass Moonie marriage, and you've got better, sharper, smarter TV than most TV. The Malleus Maleficarum caused the deaths of thousands of forward thinking women. Open Preview See a Problem? This is DeLillo after all. Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith You just got lucky. The way they hate many of the things you hate. Print Word PDF. The novel is also about: the indifference of society personified by crowds, the act of writing as a doppelganger for terrorism, and about "messianic returns" to humanity. This offers him a chance to do what he may or may not have been planning all along: disappear completely. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. The limousine from "Cosmopolis" is employed once again in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo. I would actually like to return to this someday, especially in this new millennium featuring the Global War on Terror and that most horrific and course-changing of days: September 11th, Let's say you do want to read a short book for a long time. Nowadays people watch and listen to terror-dominated news and their mindset and life-choices are affected by what has happened. -
'Little Terrors'
Don DeLillo’s Promiscuous Fictions: The Adulterous Triangle of Sex, Space, and Language Diana Marie Jenkins A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The School of English University of NSW, December 2005 This thesis is dedicated to the loving memory of a wonderful grandfather, and a beautiful niece. I wish they were here to see me finish what both saw me start. Contents Acknowledgements 1 Introduction 2 Chapter One 26 The Space of the Hotel/Motel Room Chapter Two 81 Described Space and Sexual Transgression Chapter Three 124 The Reciprocal Space of the Journey and the Image Chapter Four 171 The Space of the Secret Conclusion 232 Reference List 238 Abstract 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 pseudonymous Amazons – that feature adultery narratives. -
The Sublime in Don Delillo's Mao II
International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Online: 2015-03-23 ISSN: 2300-2697, Vol. 50, pp 137-145 doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.50.137 CC BY 4.0. Published by SciPress Ltd, Switzerland, 2015 The Sublime in Don DeLillo’s Mao II Niloufar Behrooz, Hossein Pirnajmuddin Department of English. University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran Email address: [email protected], [email protected] Keywords: Don DeLillo; postmodernism; the sublime; technology; violence; spirituality ABSTRACT The world that DeLillo’s characters live in is often portrayed with an inherent complexity beyond our comprehension, which ultimately leads to a quality of woe and wonder which is characteristic of the concept of the sublime. The inexpressibility of the events that emerge in DeLillo’s fiction has reintroduced into it what Lyotard calls “the unpresentable in presentation itself” (PC 81), or to put it in Jameson’s words, the “postmodern sublime” (38). The sublime, however, appears in DeLillo’s fiction in several forms and it is the aim of this study to examine these various forms of sublimity. It is attempted to read DeLillo’s Mao II in the light of theories of the sublime, drawing on figures like Burke, Kant, Lyotard, Jameson and Zizek. In DeLillo’s novel, it is no longer the divine and magnificent in nature that leads to a simultaneous fear and fascination in the viewers, but the power of technology and sublime violence among other things. The sublime in DeLillo takes many different names, ranging from the technological and violent to the hollow and nostalgic, but that does not undermine its essential effect of wonder; it just means that the sublime, like any other phenomenon, has adapted itself to the new conditions of representation. -
An Examination of Conspiracy and Terror in the Works of Don Delillo
Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Theses Department of English Spring 5-7-2011 For the Future: An Examination of Conspiracy and Terror in the Works of Don Delillo Ashleigh Whelan Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Whelan, Ashleigh, "For the Future: An Examination of Conspiracy and Terror in the Works of Don Delillo." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2011. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses/104 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FOR THE FUTURE: AN EXAMINATION OF CONSPIRACY AND TERROR IN THE WORKS OF DON DELILLO by ASHLEIGH WHELAN Under the Direction of Dr. Christopher Kocela ABSTRACT 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. INDEX -
Tion of Don Delillo
ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Delirious USA: the representation of capital in the fic- tion of Don DeLillo https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40479/ Version: Full Version Citation: Travers, Thomas William Lynn (2020) Delirious USA: the repre- sentation of capital in the fiction of Don DeLillo. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email Birkbeck, University of London Delirious USA: The Representation of Capital in the Fiction of Don DeLillo Thomas William Lynn Travers Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 1 Declaration I, Thomas William Lynn Travers, declare that this thesis is my own work. Where I have drawn upon the work of other researchers, this has been fully acknowledged. 2 Abstract In this thesis I offer a new reading of Don DeLillo’s fiction through an engagement with contemporary Marxist literary theory and political economy. Beginning in the 1960s, the thesis traces the launch, expansion, and shattering of DeLillo’s narrative apparatus as it recomposes itself across the genres of the short story, the conspiratorial thriller, the historical novel, and the novel of time. Developing on theories of the novel as a capitalist epic, the thesis takes the insistent appearance of surplus populations in DeLillo’s work as an opportunity to reflect on, but also to revise and reconceptualise, Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. -
AP English Literature Summer Reading (Libra by Don Delillo) 2020
Don Delillo: Libra AP English Literature Summer Reading 2020-2021 "This was the year he rode on the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track. He liked to stand at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the dark. People stood on the local platforms staring nowhere, a look they'd been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were." AP English Literature Summer Reading Assignment 2020-2021 Students enrolled in AP English Literature for the 2020-2021 school year are required to actively read and complete a series of journal entries on the novel Libra by Don Delillo. This assignment will comprise a major portion of the first quarter grade. The journal will comprise two test grades, and a conventional test on the book will also be given the day of journal collection. Furthermore, much of September will be devoted to study and discussion of Libra, and it will continually be referenced throughout the year. Your efforts on this assignment will have far-reaching consequences, so please put in your strongest effort. Below are some specifics about Libra and the accompanying journals. A scoring guide for each journal entry is attached. Libra Don DeLillo (1936—) was born and raised in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, the son of a coal miner and an ex-schoolteacher. After graduating from Fordham University, he worked for five years as a copywriter for an advertising agency, before quitting to pursue writing seriously in 1964. -
Negative Reviews of Falling Man
Schweighauser and Schneck 1 Do not cite. Schweighauser, Philipp and Peter Schneck. "Introduction: The American and the European DeLillo." Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. Ed. Schneck and Schweighauser. New York: Continuum, 2010. 1-15. The published version of this essay is available here: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/terrorism-media-and-the-ethics-of-fiction- 9781441139931/ Prof. Dr. Philipp Schweighauser Assistant Professor and Head of American and General Literatures Department of English University of Basel Nadelberg 6 4051 Basel Switzerland Phone Office: +41 61 267 27 84 Phone Secretary: +41 61 267 27 90 Fax: +41 61 267 27 80 Email: [email protected] Schweighauser and Schneck 2 Prof. Dr. Peter Schneck Director of the Institute for English and American Studies University of Osnabrück Neuer Graben 40 Room 123 D-49069 Osnabrück Germany Phone: +49 541 969 44 12 or +49 541 969 60 42 Fax: +49 541 969 42 56 Email: [email protected] Introduction: The American and the European DeLillo Philipp Schweighauser and Peter Schneck In Mao II (1991), Don DeLillo lets his protagonist, the novelist Bill Gray, speak words that have been read as eerily prophetic in the aftermath of 9/11: "Years ago [...] I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness" (41). While the collective imagination of the past was guided, DeLillo seems to suggest, by the creative order and ethos of narrative fictions told by novelists, our contemporary fantasies and anxieties are completely controlled by the endless narratives of war and terror constantly relayed by the mass media. -
Counternarratives and Double Vision in Don Delillo's 'Falling Man'
"The days after" and "the ordinary run of hours": counternarratives and double vision in Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man' Article Published Version Brauner, D. (2009) "The days after" and "the ordinary run of hours": counternarratives and double vision in Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man'. Review of International America Studies, 3/4 (3/1). pp. 72-81. ISSN 1991-2773 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/22038/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Published version at: http://www.iasaweb.org/publications/rias.html Publisher: International American Studies Association All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online Review of International American Studies ‘THE days after’ and ‘THE ordinary run of Hours’: counternarratives and double vision in Don DELillo’S FALLING MAN David Brauner The University of Reading The publication in 2007 of Don DeLillo’s fourteenth novel, Falling Man, was keenly anti- cipated and then indifferently received. As many reviewers observed, DeLillo had already dealt in previous novels with the issues that 9/11 seemed to crystallize: inter- national terrorism, the global impact of American politics and culture, the relationship between the media television—in particular—and the events on which it reports. Cit- ing a number of examples (the Happy Valley Farm Commune in Great Jones Street (1973), the Radical Matrix in Running Dog (1978), Ta Onómata in The Names (1982)), John Leon- ard points out that terrorist groups are ubiquitous in DeLillo and argues that ‘some kind of 9/11 was always implicit’ in his work (Leonard, 2007: 1). -
Don Delillo's Libra: History As Text, History As Trauma
Rethinking History Vol. 9, No. 2/3, June/September 2005, pp. 337 – 353 CLASSIC TEXTS Don DeLillo’s Libra: History as Text, History as Trauma Leonard Wilcox This article discusses Don DeLillo’s Libra as historiographic metafiction in terms of the novel’s exploration of the relation between historical events and narrative, and its sense that there is no access to the past that would be unmediated by language. Yet Libra grapples with issues that cannot be fully explained by a model that stresses the ‘already written’, textual nature of the historical referent. Drawing upon Slajov Zˇizˇek’s reading of Lacan and the Lacanian concept of ‘the real’, I explore the novel’s depiction of the Kennedy assassination as a traumatic historical event, one that eludes symbolization and poses questions about the limits of representation. I argue that DeLillo’s exploration of the relation between trauma and representation gives us a powerful metaphor of the historical project itself. Keywords: History; Metafiction; Trauma; Symbolic; Real; Zˇizˇek I When Don DeLillo’s Libra was published in 1988 it was initially met in some quarters with an astonishing degree of venom. In part, this was due to the culturally traumatic and contentious subject the novel tackled—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In no small degree it was also because DeLillo’s fictional speculations ran counter to the ‘lone gunman’ theory endorsed by the Warren Commission. Conservative columnist George F. Will condemned the novel for its ‘lunatic conspiracy theory’, and famously declared that the novel was ‘an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship’ (Will 2000, p. -
The Angel Esmeralda
Donald Richard "Don" DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American nove- list, playwright and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism. Initially a well-regarded cult writer, the publication in 1985 of White Noise brought him widespread recognition, and was followed in 1988 by Libra, a bestseller. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist (for Mao II in 1992 and for Underworld in 1998), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992 (receiving a further PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for The Angel Esmeralda in 2012), was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achie- vement in American Fiction in 2010, and won the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American . Fiction in 2013. DeLillo has described his fiction as being concerned with "living in dangerous times", and in a 2005 interview declared, "Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments. I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us. DeLillo's first collection of short stories, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, co- vering short stories published between 1979 and 2011, was published in No- vember 2011. It's impossible not to get a sense of déjà vu reading "The Angel Esmeralda," the first book of short stories in Don DeLillo's 40-year career.