The Environmental Unconscious In The Fiction Of Don Delillo

Download or read book The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo written by Elise Martucci and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Staging Don DeLillo written by Rebecca Rey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Don DeLillo written by Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Representations of Technoculture in Don DeLillo’s Novels written by Laila Sougri and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Don DeLillo written by Stacey Olster and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Understanding Don DeLillo written by Henry Veggian and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Don DeLillo after the Millennium written by Jacqueline A. Zubeck and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.