The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo

The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo
Author: Elise Martucci
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135861013

This book presents an ecocritical reading of DeLillo’s novels in an attempt to mediate between the seemingly incompatible influences of postmodernism and environmentalism. Martucci argues that although DeLillo is responding to and engaging with a postmodern culture of simulacra and simulation, his novels do not reflect a postmodernist theory of the "end of nature." Rather, his fiction emphasizes the lasting significance of the natural world and alerts us to the dangers of destroying it. In order to support this argument, Martucci examines DeLillo’s novels in the context of traditional American literary representations of the environment, especially through the lens of Leo Marx’s discussion of the conflict between technology and nature found in traditional American literature. She demonstrate that DeLillo’s fiction explores the way in which new technologies alter perceptions and mediate reality to a further extent than earlier technologies; however, she argues that he keeps the material world at the forefront of his novels, thereby illuminating the environmental implications of these technologies. Through close readings of Americana, The Names, White Noise, and Underworld, and discussions of postmodernist and ecocritical theories, this project engages with current criticism of DeLillo, postmodernist fiction, and environmental criticism.

Staging Don DeLillo

Staging Don DeLillo
Author: Rebecca Rey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2016-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317050827

The first book-length study to focus on Don DeLillo's plays, Staging Don DeLillo brings the author's theatre works to the forefront. Rebecca Rey explores four central themes that emerge across DeLillo's theatre oeuvre: the centrality of language; the human fear of death; the elusiveness of truth; and the deceptive, slippery nature of personal identity. Rey examines all seven of DeLillo's plays chronologically: "The Engineer of Moonlight" (1979), The Day Room (1986), the one-minute plays "The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven" (1990), and "The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life" (2000), Valparaiso (1999), Love-Lies-Bleeding (2006), and The Word for Snow (2014). Written in clear, accessible language, and interweaving critique of DeLillo's novels throughout, this book will appeal not only to DeLillo scholars but also to anyone working on contemporary literature and drama.

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo
Author: Katherine Da Cunha Lewin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2018-10-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350040886

Don DeLillo is widely regarded as one of the most significant, and prescient, writers of our time. Since the 1960s, DeLillo's fiction has been at the cutting edge of thought on American identity, globalization, technology, environmental destruction, and terrorism, always with a distinctively macabre and humorous eye. Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives brings together leading scholars of the contemporary American novel to guide readers through DeLillo's oeuvre, from his early short stories through to 2016's Zero K, including his theatrical work. As well as critically exploring DeLillo's engagement with key contemporary themes, the book also includes a new interview with the author, annotated guides to further reading, and a chronology of his life and work.

Representations of Technoculture in Don DeLillo’s Novels

Representations of Technoculture in Don DeLillo’s Novels
Author: Laila Sougri
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2023-09-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000928853

This book is the first to explore technoculture in all of Don DeLillo’s novels. From Americana (1971) to The Silence (2020), the American author anatomizes the constantly changing relationship between culture and technology in overt and layered aspects of the characters’ experiences. Through a tendency to discover and rediscover technocultural modes of appearance, DeLillo emphasizes settings wherein technological progress is implicated in cultural imperatives. This study brings forth representations of such implication/interaction through various themes, particularly perception, history, reality, space/architecture, information, and the posthuman. The chapters are based on a thematic structure that weaves DeLillo’s novels with the rich literary criticism produced on the author, and with the various theoretical frameworks of technoculture. This leads to the formulation and elaboration on numerous objects of research extracted from DeLillo's novels, namely: the theorization of DeLillo’s "radiance in dailiness," the investigation of various uses of technology as an extension, the role of image technologies in redefining history, the reconceptualization of the ethical and behavioral aspects of reality, the development of tele-visual and embodied perceptions in various technocultural spaces, and the involvement of information technologies in reconstructing the beliefs, behaviors, and activities of the posthuman. One of the main aims of the study is to show how DeLillo’s novels bring to light the constant transformation of technocultural everydayness. It is argued that though such transformation is confusing or resisted at times, it points to a transitional mode of being. This transitional state does not dehumanize DeLillo’s characters; it reveals their humanity in a continually changing world.

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo
Author: Stacey Olster
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2011-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441182470

A collection of original, stimulating interpretations of key texts by Don DeLillo, designed for students and edited and written by leading scholars in the field. The book offers new perspectives on two of the most important pre-millennial novels by any American writer Mao II and Underworld and the first extended discussions of Falling Man, DeLillo's exploration of 9/11 and its aftermath. An American Studies approach to the texts brings together both established DeLillo scholars and other academics whose interdisciplinary methodologies drawn from history, ethnic studies, new economic criticism, women's studies, art history, and urban studies shed new light on DeLillo's work and demonstrate its wide-ranging significance in contemporary American culture.

Understanding Don DeLillo

Understanding Don DeLillo
Author: Henry Veggian
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2014-11-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611174457

Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998). Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns—the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power—and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques. Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his "modular" working method as well as the evolution of his novels.

Don DeLillo after the Millennium

Don DeLillo after the Millennium
Author: Jacqueline A. Zubeck
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-07-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498548679

Don DeLillo after the Millennium: Currents and Currencies examines all the author’s work published in the 21st century: The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, Point Omega, and Zero K, the plays Love-Lies-Bleeding and The Word for Snow, and the short stories in The Angel Esmeralda. What topic doesn’t DeLillo tackle? Cyber-capital and currency markets, ontology and intelligence, global warming and cryogenics, Don DeLillo continues to ponder the significance of present cultural currents and to anticipate the waves of the future. Performance art and ethics, drama and euthanasia, space studies and the constrictions of time, DeLillo perspicaciously reads our culture, giving voice to the rhythms of our vernacular and diction. Rich and resonant, his work is so multifaceted in its attention that it accommodates a wide variety of critical approaches while its fine and filigreed prose commends him to a poetic appreciation as well. Don DeLillo after the Millennium brings together an international cast of scholars who examine DeLillo’s work from many critical perspectives, exploring the astonishing output of an author who continues to tell our stories and show us ourselves.

Don DeLillo In Context

Don DeLillo In Context
Author: Jesse Kavadlo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 604
Release: 2022-06-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009027190

Don DeLillo is one of the most important novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Yet despite DeLillo's prolific output and scholarly recognition, much of the attention has gone to his works individually, rather than collectively or thematically. This volume provides separate entries into the wide variety and categories of contexts that surround and help illuminate DeLillo's writings. Don DeLillo in Context examines how geography, biography, history, media studies, culture, philosophy, and the writing process provide critical frameworks and ways of reading and understanding DeLillo's prodigious body of work.

The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo

The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo
Author: Graley Herren
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501345079

Don DeLillo has spent his career reflecting upon the creative processes of artists. In recent years he has become increasingly drawn to spectators and how they project and indulge their own private obsessions through art. The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo is the first book devoted to this dimension of DeLillo's art. It is also the first book to identify and analyze a signature DeLillo motif: the embedded author. In multiple novels, short stories, and plays, DeLillo inserts a character subtly implied as the creator of the very narrative we are reading or watching. Spanning his entire career but focusing primarily on his work from Underworld (1997) to Zero K (2016), The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo breaks important new ground in DeLillo studies.