Preface to New Edition. Preface to First Edition Introduction Chapter 1: Readers and Reading 1. New Fortunes 2. Reading as a Woman 3. Stories of Reading Chapter 2: Deconstruction 1. Writing and Logocentrism 2. Meaning and Iterability 3. Grafts and Graft 4. Institutions and Inversions 5. Critical Consequences Chapter 3: Deconstructive Criticism Bibliography. Index

This thesis charts the search for an effective political aesthetic in the fiction of Don DeLillo. It examines all twelve of DeLillo's novels from Americana (1971) to The Body Artist (2001). It argues DeLillo is one of the most important contemporary American writers, precisely because his fiction takes on a culture, that of the United States of America, and engages with geopolitics and history. DeLillo has been accused of apoliticism, but on the contrary this thesis demonstrates that the quest for an effective political aesthetic has been central to DeLillo's project from the start. DeLillo's aesthetic, which is often self-consciously enacted through the figure of the artist or writer in his novel, is furthermore set up in opposition to the dominant culture of late twentieth century America. This thesis concurs with Fredric Jameson's argument that this dominant culture, postmodernism, is the superstructural manifestation of late capitalism. This thesis argues that DeLillo's position to this culture is dialectical, as he struggles to find a place of resistance from within it. Furthermore, this thesis also argues that DeLillo positions the hope for political resistance with the marginalised, such as women, homosexuals and ethnic groups. It concludes DeLillo finds his solution in a semiotic aesthetic. This aesthetic, springing in part from the subject's own body, is not entirely predetermined by the pre-existing narrative of the dominant culture, thereby restoring the individual speaking subject to some extent. However, this thesis argues that DeLillo also recognises the capacity of the dominant culture to continually reabsorb any transgression, hence it is only in an avant-garde art one that can continually "make it new" that any real hope for political resistance lies. Crucially, DeLillo plays this out in his own aesthetic by continually adopting different discourses and even in the case of The Body Artist producing a difficult and deliberately unpopular text. Finally, as his recourse to the avant-garde suggests, this thesis argues that it is wrong to regard DeLillo as an "exemplary postmodernist" as many, including Martin Amis do, concluding that his work is characterised by a strong modernist impulse.

On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism

The search for a political aesthetic in the fiction of Don DeLillo

Unlike other postmodern reading practices, deconstruction suppresses the figure of the reader: the text is viewed as both engendering and undermining its meaning, while the reader's role is only to discover these processes. Yet, when one deconstructs biblical texts, `anarchic' and `lacking logic' according to traditional Western criteria, the illusion vanishes, and it is hard to get along without the reader as an active figure. The reader's role is actively to construct the meaning of the text, before it gets deconstructed. This is the reason why in some recent works the deconstructive reading of the text is preceded by a `constructive' one. In this article the Golden Calf story (Exod. 32) is read both constructively and deconstructively. The constructive reading focuses on the opposition `normative cult—deviant cult' which is viewed as central to the story. Normative cult and deviant cult are represented by the Tablets of the Law and the Golden Calf respectively. The deconstruction of this opposition is ...

The Golden Calf Story: Constructively and Deconstructively*

Alternative Interpretations of the Political Puzzle: A Reply to Kraus and Giles

The female body has always had a double function with respect to reproduction. By becoming pregnant and giving birth the female body literally reproduces life. At the same time, metaphorically it is often seen as the safeguard of the nation, the reproduction of national values, tradition, and patriarchal history. However, both these reproductive functions have often worked at the cost of the body of the woman, who disappears in the shadow of her offspring and of history. Since the 1970s both French feminist theory and Anglo-American feminist film theory and practice have begun to reclaim the female body and rewrite history. A young generation of transnational women directors of Maghrebin descent, who live and work between the Maghreb and Europe, now seems to continue this feminist project in their films, albeit with some new dimensions.2 In this essay I argue that contemporary concerns with the female body in transnational Moroccan cinema are most productively understood in relation to the Deleuzian concepts of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-minoritarian.” Although initially critically received by feminist philosophers, these concepts in fact relate very well to feminist concerns and provide new and paradoxical ways of understanding postcolonial transnational cinema in relation to the nation, minorities, and the body of women.

On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism

Citations

The search for a political aesthetic in the fiction of Don DeLillo

The Golden Calf Story: Constructively and Deconstructively*

Alternative Interpretations of the Political Puzzle: A Reply to Kraus and Giles

The Refusal of Reproduction : Paradoxes of Becoming - Woman in Transnational Moroccan Filmmaking

Religion and Literature: History and Method

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