We respond in language to catastrophic, or traumatic, shocks to symbolic systems, for which the fall of the Tower of Babel can be seen as a mythic model. One response is an exploration of new uncertainties; another is a fearful rigidity that seeks to return to an imagined Adamic wholeness of language; another is an effort to transcend language altogether. This essay examines two contemporary responses to a perceived “fall” of language—several case studies of Oliver Sacks's and two novels by Don DeLillo—and places them in the context of the twentieth-century “linguistic turn” in the humanities and social sciences and what I call a “counterlinguistic turn” that is contemporaneous with the linguistic turn and represents developments of some of its key assumptions.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25486164.pdf

Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo, and Turns against Language

Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction

Don DeLillo's Latin Mass

T he simulacrum, “a copy without an original,” 1 is the most salient metaphor of White Noise, a novel in which simulations exploit real catastrophes, and in which tourists visit the “most photographed barn in America” not to see the barn but to see photographs of the barn. Further emphasizing the distance between experience and expression is the novelʼs emphasis on the ineluctably representative nature of language. The disconnection between signifi er and signifi ed, pointedly demonstrated in conversations between the narrator, Jack Gladney, and his son, Heinrich, and the collapse of etymologically sound meaning (such as the absence of Germans in Germantown) suggest that words, too, are copies without originals. Deja vu, one of the many shifting symptoms of contamination from the airborne toxic event, renders memory itself suspect, suggesting that the earlier experiences upon which recollections seem to depend may not exist. The lack of originating moments results in a persistent conversation with the past, an overwhelming nostalgia for a more stable moment in history. Academics and housewives routinely seek distraction in news of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe because, as Murray Siskind, a visiting lecturer on Elvis Presley, aptly notes, “‘[h]elpless and fearful people are drawn to magical fi gures, mythic fi guresʼ”; and the nar

?How the dead speak to the living?: Intertextuality and the Postmodern Sublime inWhite Noise

The Obsolescence of Mystery and the Accumulation of Waste in Don DeLillo's Underworld

tW ~ # hat is the postmodern response to the truth claims traditionally made on behalf of visionary moments? By "visionary moment," I mean that flash of insight or sudden revelation which critically raises the level of spiritual or self-awareness of a fictional character. It is a mode of cognition typically represented as bypassing rational thought processes and attaining a "higher" or redemptive order of knowledge (gnosis). There are, conceivably, three types of postmodern response which merit attention here. First, in recognition of the special role literature itself has played in establishing the credibility of visionary moments, postmodern writers might draw on the resources of metafiction to parodically "lay bare" the essentially literary nature of such moments. Baldly stated, the visionary moment could be exposed as a literary convention, that is, a concept that owes more to the practice of organizing narratives around a sudden illumination (as in, say, the narratives of Wordsworth's Prelude or Joyce's Dubliners) than to reallife experience. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is premised on this assumption. Pynchon's sleuthlike protagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds herself in a situation in which clues-contrary to the resolution of the standard detective story-proliferate uncontrollably, thereby impeding the emergence of a final enlightenment or "stelliferous Meaning" (82). It is a situation that not only frustrates Oedipa, who is continually tantalized by the sense that "a revelation . . . trembled just past the threshold of her understand

Paul Maltby

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The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo