Postmodernist authors

Don DeLillo

Americana (1971) End Zone (1972) Great Jones Street (1973) Ratner's Star (1976) Players (1977) Running Dog (1978) Amazons (1980) (under pseudonym "Cleo Birdwell") The Names (1982) White Noise (1985) Libra (1988) Mao II (1991) Underworld (1997) The Body Artist (2001) Cosmopolis (2003) Falling Man (2007) Point Omega (2010)

Don DeLillo (b. 1936, Bronx, Italian American)

Postmodernist fiction: engaging with the real

1962: historian Daniel Boorstin: shift in the rel. bt. the news media and real-life events Americana (1971) realist; the episodic adventures of a young TV executive, David Bell, who gives up his job to travel the US in search of himself. => announces DeLillos interest in the exploration of American national consciousness Great Jones Street (1973) the entertainment industry: the machinery of fame and its horrors for guitarist Bucky Wunderlick End Zone (1972, on football players articulating philosophical positions; apocalyptic tones PM) and Ratners Star (1976, on the trappings of SF) high postmodernism

White Noise (1985) an Airborne Toxic Event just after the 1985 chemical spill in Bhopal, India => an uncanny commentary on the environmental disaster, even though the novel was in press even before the accident occurred. Jean Baudrillard: if the Gulf War was a non-event, 9/11 was the absolute event (The Spirit of Terrorism) Players (1977) and Mao II (1991), Falling Man (2007) 9/11 terrorist attacks Running Dog (1978) political thriller (sexual activity in Hitlers bunker towards the end of WWII) Libra (1988) a transitional moment in Am. Consciousness: JFKs assassination, which ends an age of political innocence + a moment when the effects of the media serve as fundamental mutation in Americans lived relationship to the world. Underworld (1997) an anatomy of the emergence of paranoia as a constitutive feature of American identity during the Cold-War period.

History
John Duvall: DeLillos fiction is an invitation to think historically Even though Am PM novels, Libra, Mao II and Underworld promote a social critique that often proceeds from Linda Hutcheons historiographic metafiction (A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988: the PM novel blends the reflexivity of metafiction fiction that calls attention to itself as fiction with an explicit questioning of what counts as official history => the fiction/history boundaries are blurred) DeLillo recognizes the power of history, but insists on the novel as a counterforce to the wound of history through the persistence of mystery + the role of the artist in a consumer society

White Noise (1985)

//The pressure of advertising makes it difficult to think historically (when the very structures of thought seem to have been coopted by the logic of TV genres: radio, TV, film and the internet = social forces A culture of simulation (s. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1981) => Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies interested in Nazi aesthetics has lost sight of the horrors of the Nazi past and hence of the equal horrors of his intensely media-driven, aestheticised present

Influences
Post-modern seems to mean different things in different disciplines. In architecture and art it means one or two different things. In fiction it seems to mean another. When people say White Noise is post-modern, I dont really complain. I dont say it myself. But I dont see Underworld as post-modern. Maybe its the last modernist gasp. I dont know. (interview, 1998)

DeLillos affinity to modernism

James Joyce: the focus on language (interview, 1993): the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history Americana several characters demonstrate detailed knowledge of Joyces Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Drawing on high modernist aesthetic => DeLillo complicates traditional distinctions bt modern and postmodern: surreal juxtapositions (s. Ren Magritte) The artist as hero + the artists responsibility Techniques such as cinematic montage (Joyce, Faulkner)

White Noises postmodernity

One of the most frequently taught postwar novels Anthropological attention to aspects of the western world Is DeLillos writing managing to maintain a critical distance from the culture he describes? Simulation and mediation, but also the waning of affect: Jack Gladneys media saturation is taken to comic effect The implicit logic of late capitalism

 a college professor forced to realise that he is just every man in any city + DeLillos own task of finding a critical position from which to delineate a cultural phenomenon without being wholly absorbed by it. Consumption in the late 20th c: global, yet American (Jameson: technology as shorthand) Crowd control: the supermarket offers spiritual consensus (WN p. 18)

Groups and crowds

In WN, the sense of union bt people no longer depends on their physical proximity: Friday night gatherings with Chinese take-out that join Jack and Babettes children from previous marriages into a blended whole also join the enlarged Gladney family to other families in the country through the television shows they watch while eating => TV as a site of parasocial interaction, with the lounge as its site

The hierarchical importance of events

World catastrophes go unnoticed while details can take precedence over them (the influence of surrealism on postmodernism) The comfort of being under control: Babette says that people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do sth is the right way or the wrong way (WN pp. 171-2) Screens/systems/souls (s. M Foucault)

Falling Man
Nickname given to a man who actually fell from the North Tower on 9/11 (emblematic for a more general human condition, like Bellows Dangling Man), inspired from a press article (s. photo taken by Richard Drew, Sept. 11, 2001) Choosing ones death A survivor of the 9/11 attacks, whose fall is then dubbed by an artist all over the city.