DeLillo's Novels Research Articles

Possible Futures

Possible Futures

Hysterical Realism in Don DeLillo's Novels: Death Phobia, Hypochondria and The Revival of Religion

Hysterical Realism in Don DeLillo's Novels: Death Phobia, Hypochondria and The Revival of Religion

A Deep Insider’s Elegiac Tribute: The Work of Don DeLillo in David Foster Wallace’s <i>Infinite Jest</i>

This article explores the influence the work of Don DeLillo has on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), scrutinising the way Wallace built some of his most important themes on a foundation of literary allusion, particularly to the DeLillo novels End Zone (1972) and Americana (1971). This article also incorporates the use of archival material that shows both authors corresponding about literature and writing, which is also illuminating when investigating the origins of Infinite Jest’s sub-textual meaning. In order to thoroughly describe the theoretical import of this relationship, this article also considers Wallace’s engagement with the critical theories of influence, specifically his overt and creative use of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) in the novel.

“A Bruised Cartoonish Quality”: The Death of an American Supervillain in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis may be Don DeLillo's most harshly reviewed book, but that is partly due to the application by reviewers of inappropriately naturalistic standards of storytelling. Cosmopolis is actually a graphic novel without the pictures, a mythopoetic vision of a moment of crisis in American history, and the portrait of a great American supervillain. Understanding Cosmopolis in this way explains both why the book was hard for some readers to like and why it will be the first of DeLillo's novels to make it onto the big screen.

Sorrow's rigging: the novels of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone

Through the writings of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone, Sorrow's Rigging reflects on the American scene from the outbreak of the Vietnam War in 1965 to the uncertain future. In an innovative new reading, Gary Adelman presents these three authors as Catholic cowboys, renegades, and above all furious parodists of Americana and its larger-than-life mythology, dreams, innocence, and power. Adelman explores the common inheritance of these American lapsed Catholics, born between the two World Wars, who found their voices on the eve of the Vietnam conflict. Their worlds are permeated by spirituality, rage, despair, and self-hatred. He shows how McCarthy creates macabre pageants of hope throttled, while in the Dantesque world of DeLillo's novels, psychopathic characters turn on themselves in an effort to overcome fear of the past. In Stone's work, the characters' rage is turned inward as a form of self-punishment for being a holdout against God. Sorrow's Rigging is a study of panic at the death of hope expressed in novels born of the terrors writers cannot escape, yet in the very act of writing they redeem the world through art.

Apocalyptic Cycles in Don DeLillo's Underworld

Apocalyptic Cycles in Don DeLillo's Underworld

Randy Laist,Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels

Randy Laist,Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels

Tibetan Buddhism in Don DeLillo's Novels: The Street, The Word and The Soul

Joseph Dewey divides Don DeLillo's novels into three chronological stages: the first, in which he embraced the street; the second, in which he tested his own deep fascination with the word; and the third, in which he turned to the implications of the soul. Dewey's three stages have a parallel in the Tibetan Buddhist Tri-Kaya , with the street corresponding to the Priesthood ( Sangha ), the word to the Scriptures ( Dharma ), and the soul to the Buddha . This essay traces the remarkable development of DeLillo's spirituality through the three stages of his writing. In contrast to Dewey's view that DeLillo channeled his Catholicism into his evident fascination with the vision and metaphors of Eastern traditions, the present essay argues that DeLillo developed his sense of spirituality primarily from Tibetan Buddhism, and then channeled that spirituality back into Catholicism.

Apocalyptic Nostalgia in the Prologue of Don DeLillo’s Underworld

Characters in Don DeLillo's novels repeatedly grapple with the existential contradiction which Frank Kermode has called the "immanent apocalypse" and which Jean Baudrillard has identified as a nuclear "implosion." DeLillo's fictions commonly depict the post-apocalyptic sensibility Kermode and Baudrillard describe; a historical transition from the conventional kind of apocalypse - the end that will happen - to the postmodern variety - the end that is always already happening. DeLillo's most concise illustration of this condition is arguably the prologue to his 1997 opus, Underworld. Originally published in 1993 in Harper's as "Pafko at the Wall," this 50-page vignette tells the story of the famous Dodgers-Giants game in 1951, the game concluded by Bobby Thompson's three-run, game-winning, pennant-deciding homer that came to be known as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World." DeLillo evokes and manipulates the nostalgia inherent in this collective memory to dramatize the manner in which apocalypticism enters into the structure of Cold War perception. According to DeLillo's conceit in the prologue, the crack of Thompson's bat announces the postmodernizing of the apocalyptic imagination in the American psyche. This narrative device allows DeLillo to interrogate the apocalyptic shift from various points of view, as well as to induct the reader into a sense of his or her own situatedness within this historical reinscription.

“Things That Happen and What We Say About Them”: Speaking the Ordinary in DeLillo’sThe Names

Near the end of Don DeLillo's The Names, Owen Brademas is recounting his childhood experience with glossolalia. The scene is charismatic church in the Midwest; his parents are full of the Spirit, but he himself cannot summon spiritual tongue, and indeed is paralyzed by the preacher's unrelenting rhetoric. The reader receives the language of this preacher indirectly, mediated by the narrator: There is Spirit lurking here. Show me the scripture that says we have to speak English to know the joy of talking freely to God. Ridiculous, we say. There's no such document. Paul to the Corinthians said men can speak with the tongues of angels. In our time we can do the same. (306) One does not think to question the preacher's scholarship, but he has made mistake, and the mistake is emblematic of the specious ambitions of language in the novel as whole. The mistake involves the subtle falsification of Saint Paul's words. What his first letter to the Corinthians actually says is this: If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or clanging cymbal (13:1). Speaking with the tongues of angels is spoken of only as possibility, and the possibility itself operates only as provocation to foreground its superior: love. In this scene, however, Owen is cut off from such intersubjective possibilities. Unable to speak and tempted to begin striking himself, he flees the church into the rain outside. That the preacher's aspiration for language to achieve total metaphysical transparency--a condition of expression proper to the angels--is source of social alienation for young boy implies critique of such aspiration. Its trajectory overshoots what the novel sees as the proper habitation of language: the ordinary world of human relations. James Axton, the narrator and main protagonist, knows this by the end of the book, when he says, is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about (312). The breadth of this definition marks the growing identity of language itself with love, and the coincidence of both with attention to ordinary experience. Much of the early criticism of The Names understood the novel as postmodern exploration of language's possibilities and deficiencies, its fecundity and indeterminacy. For Paula Bryant, at stake in the novel was a language system which refuses to fulfill its implied promise to define reality, let alone allow [one] to communicate with others to [one's] satisfaction (18). This paradigm is still current; its most compelling recent spokesman is David Cowart, who reads The Names along the lines of his general account, in which DeLillo's aesthetic suggests recognition that language will always resist and betray attempts by the unsubtle to make it transparent medium, window on the world of things. Immured in language, one has ... only words to play with--words that refer to other words and such reality as words may construct, but never to the world in its extralinguistic integrity. (2) This model of criticism tends to focus on what language cannot do in DeLillo's novels, on its persistent thwarting of our expressive and hermeneutic aspirations. I want to make the case that while The Names cannot be understood without these insights, it moves beyond them as it strives to narrow the gap between our hopes for language and what it accomplishes. In doing this it explores not only language's slippery refusals but also the psychological and moral conditions that animate the very expectations we place on it. The novel moves, in other words, from delineation of our frustration to an inquiry into whether we should be frustrated at all. I want to suggest that after staging an implicit struggle between competing conceptions of language, The Names affirms vision in which language is, before all else, the fertile domain of our response to the ordinary world. …

Wallpaper Mao: Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol, and Seriality

Andy Warhol appears in two of Don DeLillo's novels, Mao II and Underworld. Moo II takes its title from a Warhol silkscreen that also adorns the cover of the novel; in the novel, DeLillo's characters look at Warhol's work in museums and offer theories about the work's power. Warhol is less of a factor in Underworld. He appears only once, in the chapter describing Truman Capote's Black and White Ball—“Andy Warhol walked by wearing a mask that was a photograph of his own face” (571)—but this brief appearance highlights some important connections between Warhol and DeLillo.

Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo.

In Nobody's Home, Arnold Weinstein defies the current trends of cultural studies and postmodern criticism to create a sweeping account of American fiction. From Hawthorne's Wakefield to Don deLillo's novels, the book pursues the idea of freedom of speech in the work of American writers. Though many contemporary critics emphasize the ways in which we are bound by the limitations of culture, history and language, Weinstein sees the issue of freedom (to speak, to create a self, to overcome repression) as central to the enterprise of American fiction in the past two centuries. Weinstein brings together canonical American texts by Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway with contemporary fiction by John Hawkes, Toni Morrison, Robert Coover and Don deLillo. This broad historical continuum is charted in a critical style that is lucid and engaging. The book's superb readings of individual texts, together form a coherent and inspiring vision of the great achievements of American fiction.

Baudrillard, DeLillo's "White Noise," and the End of Heroic Narrative

From Americana, through Great Jones Street, White Noise, and Libra, Don DeLillo's novels have been concerned with the relationship between American identity and the mediascapes. If the two earlier works were preoccupied with the way in which the American dream is manipulated by the media, the later two chart a world that is mediated by and constituted in the technologico-semiotic regime. In White Noise DeLillo's protagonist Jack Gladney confronts a new order in which life is increasingly lived in a world of simulacra, where images and electronic representations replace direct experience. In Libra, Lee Oswald is a product of that order; a figure devoted to media selffashioning, he constructs his lifeand indeed his deathfrom the proliferation of charismatic images and spectacles of a postmodern society.1 White Noise and Libra particularly, with their interest in electronic mediation and representation, present a view of life in contemporary America that is uncannily similar to that depicted by Jean Baudrillard. They indicate that the transformations of contemporary society that Baudrillard describes in his theoretical writings on information and media have also gripped the mind and shaped the novels of Don DeLillo. For White Noise especially because it most specifically explores the realm of information and mediascape Baudrillard's works provide an interesting, valuable, and even crucial perspective. The informational world Baudrillard delineates bears a striking resemblance to the world of White Noise: one characterized by the collapse of the and the flow of signifiers emanating from an information society, by a loss of the real in a black hole of simulation and the play and exchange of signs. In this world common to both Baudrillard and DeLillo, images, signs, and codes engulf objective