Book•
Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo
11 Mar 1993-
TL;DR: In Nobody's Home as discussed by the authors, Arnold Weinstein defies the current trends of cultural studies and post-modern criticism to create a sweeping account of American fiction, from Hawthorne's "Wakefield" to Don deLillo's novels, pursues the idea of freedom of speech in the work of American writers.
Abstract: 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.
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Book•
01 Feb 2002
TL;DR: DeLillo's career-long exploration of language and his emergence as a post-modern novelist of major stature has been examined in this paper, where the authors discuss each of the twelve novels of Don DeLillo's twelve novels, including his most recent work, The Body Artist.
Abstract: A close examination of the writer's career-long exploration of language and his emergence as a postmodern novelist of major stature; 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.
60 citations
Dissertation•
24 Nov 2014
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a dialectique du voilement and du devoilement a travers le prisme de l’Histoire en tenant compte de sa dimension non seulement phenomenologique and traumatique mais egalement a partir de the notion d’alterite que l‘evenement sous-tend.
Abstract: Cette these se propose d’interroger la notion d’evenement comme motif organisateur de la fiction de Don DeLillo. En effet, l’assassinat du president J. F. Kennedy et les attentats du 11 septembre sont des phenomenes qui resistent infatigablement au « reel », et a toute tracabilite ontologique ou phenomenologique. A ce titre, ils excedent la pensee et exigent une reponse necessaire de l’auteur et de son ecriture face a leur irruption. Ils representent une incursion excessive dans le « reel » et se manifestent sous la forme du surplus. Mais l’evenement n’est pas simplement un surplus de realite, il est aussi un surplus de sens, entendu comme inadequation du signe a ce qu’il designe. Il s’agira de montrer dans un premier temps que l’evenement se montre excessivement dans le retrait de sa monstration. Nous aborderons cette dialectique du voilement et du devoilement a travers le prisme de l’Histoire en tenant compte de sa dimension non seulement phenomenologique et traumatique mais egalement a partir de la notion d’alterite que l’evenement sous-tend. Ce paradoxe une fois revele, nous nous pencherons sur la question du temps car l’evenement remet en question l’origine qui le fait advenir et ne prend sens seulement que lorsqu’il est advenu. Il deregle de facto la temporalite qui avait cours. Il sera alors question de mettre en lumiere le dereglement des instances du temps « classique » : passe, present et futur. Nous nous focaliserons sur la question du ressassement en nous interessant, par ailleurs, a la maniere par laquelle les concepts de temps, d’evenement et d’alterite fonctionnent de conserve. Enfin, nous aborderons l’evenement en tant qu’evenement-recit en accentuant notre etude sur le terrorisme et la terreur, notions indissociables de la fiction delillienne, en ce qu’ils fournissent des modeles de totalite et de totalisation que l’ecriture de l’evenement s’emploie — ethiquement — a defaire. En ce sens, l’evenement prendra la forme d’un contre-evenement. Il s’agira par consequent de decrypter les evenements de texte que DeLillo propose comme moyen de resistance a toute totalisation. Enfin, nous considererons certains personnages comme des evenements dans la mesure ou ils reassertent le caractere evenemential de l’individu.
50 citations
Book•
20 May 2010
TL;DR: The space reserved for irony and paradox in Don DeLillo's White Noise, Paul Auster's City of Glass and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is explored in this paper.
Abstract: Introduction Chapter 1 'The space reserved for irony': Irony and Paradox in Don DeLillo's White Noise, Paul Auster's City of Glass and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho Chapter 2 Silence, Secrecy and Sexuality: 'Alternate Histories' in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex Chapter 3 'Nes and Yo': Race, Ethnicity and Hybridity in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, Philip Roth's The Human Stain and Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing Chapter 4 Contemporary American Fiction Goes to Hollywood: Genre in the Texts and Films of Cold Mountain, Brokeback Mountain and No Country for Old Men Conclusion
44 citations
Dissertation•
01 Jan 2019
40 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines two contemporary responses to a perceived "fall" of language and places them in the context of the twentieth-century "linguistic turn" in the humanities and social sciences.
Abstract: 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.
34 citations