Author: Mark Osteen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812235517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Don DeLillo once remarked to an interviewer that his intention is to use "the whole picture, the whole culture," of America. Since the publication of his first novel Americana in 1971, DeLillo has explored modern American culture through a series of acclaimed novels, including White Noise (1985; winner of the American Book Award), Libra (1988), and Underworld (1997). For Mark Osteen, the most bracing and unsettling feature of DeLillo's work is that, although his fiction may satirize cultural forms, it never does so from a privileged position outside the culture. His work brilliantly mimics the argots of the very phenomena it dissects: violent thrillers and conspiracy theories, pop music, advertising, science fiction, film, and television. As a result, DeLillo has been read both as a denouncer and as a defender of contemporary culture; in fact, Osteen argues, neither description is adequate. DeLillo's dialogue with modern institutions, such as chemical companies, the CIA, and the media, respects their power and ingenuity while criticizing their dangerous consequences. Even as DeLillo borrows from their discourses, he maintains a tenaciously opposing stance toward the sources of collective power.
Author: Joseph Dewey
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570036446
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
In the closing decade of the twentieth century, Don DeLillo emerged from the privileged status of a writer's writer to become by any measure - productivity, influence, scope, gravitas - the dominant novelist of fin-de-millennium America. Beginning in 1982 with The Names and continuing with White Noise and Underworld, DeLillo defined himself as a provocative, articulate anatomist of American culture. Dewey offers an astute assessment of this daunting yet important writer's four-decade cultural critique. Dewey finds DeLillo's concerns to be organized around three rubrics that mark the writer's own creative evolution: the love of the street, the embrace of the word, and the celebration of the soul. Dewey takes the reader through the novelist's hip avant-garde satires of the mid-1960s, his dense interrogations of the power of language and the spell of narrative in the 1980s and 1990s, and his recent efforts to transcend the immediate. Dewey explores DeLillo's fascination with Eastern philosophies, interest in Native American traditions, passion for jazz, and deep roots in Catholicism.
Author: Tony Tanner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521783743
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
A collection of essays by the late Tony Tanner on a wide range of key American authors.
Author: David Cowart
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820342262
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Don DeLillo, author of twelve novels and winner of the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the William Dean Howells Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize, has begun to rival Thomas Pynchon as the definitive postmodern novelist. Always thought-provoking and occasionally controversial, DeLillo has become the voice of the bimillennial moment. Charting DeLillo's emergence as a contemporary novelist of major stature, David Cowart discusses each of DeLillo's twelve novels, including his most recent work, The Body Artist (2001). Rejecting the idea that DeLillo lacks affinities across the cultural spectrum, Cowart argues that DeLillo's work invites comparison with that of wide range of antecedents, including Dunbar, Whitman, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Hemingway, Joyce, Rilke, and Eliot. At the same time, Cowart explores the ways in which DeLillo's art anticipates, parallels, and contests ideas that have become the common currency of poststructuralist theory. The major site of DeLillo's engagement with postmodernism, Cowart argues, is language, which DeLillo represents as more mysterious--numinous even--than current theory allows. For DeLillo, language remains what Cowart calls "the ground of all making." Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language is a provocative investigation of the most compelling issues of contemporary fiction.
Author: Erich Hertz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623561450
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Contemporary popular music provides the soundtrack for a host of recent novels, but little critical attention has been paid to the intersection of these important art forms. Write in Tune addresses this gap by offering the first full-length study of the relationship between recent music and fiction. With essays from an array of international scholars, the collection focuses on how writers weave rock, punk, and jazz into their narratives, both to develop characters and themes and to investigate various fan and celebrity cultures surrounding contemporary music. Write in Tune covers major writers from America and England, including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Jim Crace. But it also explores how popular music culture is reflected in postcolonial, Latino, and Australian fiction. Ultimately, the book brings critical awareness to the power of music in shaping contemporary culture, and offers new perspectives on central issues of gender, race, and national identity.
Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621968383
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Author: Laila Sougri
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000928853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
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.
Author: Amy Hungerford
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400834910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.
Author: Patrick O'Donnell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119431719
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1607
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Book Description
Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.
Author: Mark Dery
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816677735
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
The author explores the darkest corners of the American psyche--including the sexual fantasies of Star Trek fans, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, the homoerotic subtext of professional football, the poetic aspects of spam email and much more.
