Download or read book Death Time and Mortality in the Later Novels of Don DeLillo written by Philipp Wolf and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-30 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first systematic study of death in the later novels of Don DeLillo. It focuses on Underworld to The Silence, along with his 1984 novel White Noise, in which the fear of death dominates the protagonists most hauntingly. The study covers eight novels, which mark the development of one of the most philosophical and prestigious novelists writing in English. Death, in its close relation to time, temporality and transience, has been an ongoing subject or motif in Don DeLillo’s oeuvre. His later work is shot through with the cultural and sociopsychological symptoms and responses death elicits. His "reflection on dying" revolves around defensive mechanisms and destruction fantasies, immortalism and cryonics, covert and overt surrogates, consumerism and media, and the mortification of the body. His characters give themselves to mourning and are afflicted with psychosis, depression and the looming of emptiness. Yet writing about death also means facing the ambiguity and failing representability of "death." The book considers DeLillo’s use of language in which temporality and something like "death" may become manifest. It deals with the transfiguration of time and death into art, with apocalypse as a central and recurring subject, and, as a kind of antithesis, epiphany. The study eventually proposes some reflections on the meaning of death in an age fully contingent on media and technology and dominated by financial capitalism and consumerism. Despite all the distractions, death remains a sinister presence, which has beset the minds not only of DeLillo’s protagonists.
Download or read book Zero K written by Don DeLillo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A New York Times bestseller, “DeLillo’s haunting new novel, Zero K—his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld” (The New York Times), is a meditation on death and an embrace of life. Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body. “We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?” These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book’s narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.” Don DeLillo’s “daring…provocative…exquisite” (The Washington Post) new novel weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.” “One of the most mysterious, emotionally moving, and rewarding books of DeLillo’s long career” (The New York Times Book Review), Zero K is a glorious, soulful novel from one of the great writers of our time.
Download or read book White Noise written by Don DeLillo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999-06-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant satire of mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a teacher of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America. Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud, unleashed by an industrial accident, floats over there lives, an "airborne toxic event" that is a more urgent and visible version of the white noise engulfing the Gladneys—the radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, and TV murmurings that constitute the music of American magic and dread.
Download or read book Representations of Technoculture in Don DeLillo s Novels written by Laila Sougri and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Lynd Ward s Wordless Novels 1929 1937 written by Grant F. Scott and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-30 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905–1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an evolving experiment in a new form of visual narrative that offers a keen intervention in the cultural and sexual politics of the 1930s. The novels form a discrete group – much like Beethoven’s piano sonatas or Keats’s great odes – in which Ward evolves a unique modernist style (cinematic, expressionist, futurist, realist, documentary) and grapples with significant cultural and political ideas in a moment when the American experiment and capitalism itself hung in the balance. In testing the limits of a new narrative form, Ward’s novels require a versatile critical framework as sensitive to German Expressionism and Weimar cinema as to labor politics and the new energies of proletarian homosexuality.
Download or read book Unhappy Beginnings written by Isabel González-Díaz and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the analysis of a selection of North American texts that dismantle and resist normative frames through the resignification of concepts such as unhappiness, precarity, failure, and vulnerability. The chapters bring to the fore how those potentially negative elements can be refigured as ambivalent sites of resistance and social bonding. Following Sara Ahmed’s rereading of happiness, other authors such as Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, or Henry Giroux are mobilized to interrogate films, memoirs, and novels that deal with precarity, alienation, and inequality. The monograph contributes to enlarging the archives of unhappiness by changing the focus from prescribed norms and happy endings to unruly practices and unhappy beginnings. As the different contributors show, unhappiness, precarity, vulnerability, or failure can be harnessed to illuminate ways of navigating the world and framing society that do not necessarily conform to the script of happiness—whatever that means.
Download or read book Authoritarianism and Class in American Political Fiction written by David Smit and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes what many critics consider to be the three best examples of modern American political fiction—Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place—to address a specific problem in American governance: how the intense competition for power among elite factions often results in their ignoring major groups of their constituents, thereby providing political bosses with a rationale to seize authoritarian control of the government in the name of constituent groups who feel ignored or neglected, promising them more democratic rule, but in the process, excluding other groups, so that the bosses themselves become elitist, ruling only for the sake of some constituents and not others.
Download or read book J Hillis Miller and the Play of Literature written by Jonathan Locke Hart and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-27 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to discuss the full sweep of the work of J. Hillis Miller, from his earliest writing in the 1950s to those near the time of his death in February 2021 across the genres of his criticism and theory—poetry, fiction, drama, fiction, non-fiction. The book examines Miller’s preference for close and careful reading of individual literary and critical works over abstract theory. The study will discuss the member of the so-called Yale School of deconstruction to die but will see him as a reader and lover of literature, someone interested in Georges Poulet and phenomenology and in Jacques Derrida and deconstruction. Miller was concerned about many aspects of literature and life, including the pleasure of reading and writing as in climate change, which he saw as the crisis of our time. Miller was well known in humanities and literature worldwide, one of the greatest of modern critics and theorists.
Download or read book The Problem of Free Will in David Foster Wallace written by Paolo Pitari and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-27 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that David Foster Wallace failed to provide a response to the existential predicament of our time. Wallace wanted to confront despair through art, but he remained trapped, and his entrapment originates in the "existentialist contradiction": the impossibility of affirming the meaningfulness of life and an ethics of compassion while believing in free will. To substantiate this thesis, the analysis reads Wallace in conversation with the existentialist philosophers and writers who influenced him: Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It compares his non-fiction with the sociologies of Christopher Lasch, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, and Anthony Giddens. And it finds inspiration in Giacomo Leopardi, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Emanuele Severino to conclude that the philosophy which pervades Wallace’s works entails despair and represents the essence of our civilization’s interpretation of the world.
Download or read book The Mercurial Mark Twain s written by James L. Machor and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who was Mark Twain? Was he the genial author of two beloved boys books, the white-haired and white-suited avuncular humorist, the realistic novelist, the exposer of shams, the author repressed by bourgeois values, or the social satirist whose later writings embody an increasingly dark view? In light of those and other conceptions, the question we need to ask is not who he was but how did we get so many Mark Twains? The Mercurial Mark Twains(s): Reception History and Iconic Authorship provides answers to that question by examining the way Twain, his texts, and his image have been constructed by his audiences. Drawing on archival records of responses from common readers, reviewer reactions, analyses by Twain scholars and critics, and film and television adaptations, this study provides the first wide-ranging, fine-grained historical analysis of Twain’s reception in both the public and private spheres, from the 1860s until the end of the twentieth century.
Download or read book From Subjection to Survival written by Molly J. Freitas and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-23 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Subjection to Survival is a work of feminist scholarship that works at the intersection of literature and art history, the written and the visual. By examining six important and diverse multiethnic American women writers of the twentieth century (Kate Chopin, Anzia Yezierska, Edith Wharton, Zitkala-Ša, Nella Larsen, and Helena María Viramontes), From Subjection to Survival establishes a genealogy of how women writers claim the power and possibility of visual art to make sense of their experiences. These writers write about women and feature female protagonists who engage with art as painters, writers, muses, or icons in the texts themselves. The texts are written visually to expose the fundamental substantiation of gender in art and the unavoidable aestheticization of women in daily life. As every text in this book makes clear, women can claim substantial power through art. Yet, aestheticization is not always positive. As a consequence of such negative possibilities, the artistic self-referentiality of all of the texts in From Subjection to Survival exposes a negotiated course between subjectivity and objectness which women experience when engaging with art. From Subjection to Survival studies this negotiated course to lay bare the difficult path of women’s artistic and aesthetic experience, but ultimately to claim the power and the possibility of the visual arts for women.
Download or read book Asian American War Stories written by Jeffrey Tyler Gibbons and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian American War Stories examines contemporary Asian American literature that considers both the short-term and the long-term effects of war, trauma, and displacement on civilians, as well as the ways that individuals seek healing in the face of suffering. Through the works of contemporary writers like Chang-rae Lee, Ocean Vuong, Nora Okja Keller, Julie Otsuka, Lan Cao, and Lawson Inada, this book explores the ways that recent Asian American literature reflects the enduring consequences of America’s wars in Asia at the individual and collective levels. The book also considers the journeys that individuals take as they pursue healing of their traumatic wounds.
Download or read book The Fun Parts written by Sam Lipsyte and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fun Parts is Sam Lipsyte at his very best—a far-ranging exploration of new voices and vistas from "the most consistently funny fiction writer working today" (Time). A boy eats his way to self-discovery, while another must battle the reality-brandishing monster preying on his fantasy realm. Elsewhere, an aerobics instructor—the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—makes the most shocking leap imaginable to save her soul. These are just a few of the characters you'll encounter in Sam Lipsyte's richly imagined world. Featuring a grizzled and possibly deranged male doula, a doomsday hustler who must face the multi-universal truth of "the real-ass jumbo," and a tawdry glimpse of a high school shot-putting circuit in northern New Jersey, circa 1986, Lipsyte's short stories combine the tragicomic brilliance of his beloved novels with the compressed vitality of Venus Drive.
Download or read book Death and the Self in the Novels of Don DeLillo written by Sean Patrick Griffith and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Silence written by Don DeLillo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the National Book Award–winning author of Underworld, a “daring…provocative…exquisite” (The Washington Post) novel about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event. It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a “brilliant and astonishing…masterpiece” (Chicago Tribune) about what makes us human. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of the Covid pandemic. His language, the dazzle of his sentences offer a kind of solace in our bewildering world. “DeLillo’s shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel” (Entertainment Weekly). “In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we’ve come to rely on. The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo’s entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal.” —Rachel Kushner
Download or read book Death in Literature written by Outi Hakola and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death is an inevitable, yet mysterious event. Fiction is one way to imagine and gain knowledge of death. Death is very useful to literature, as it creates plot twists, suspense, mysteries, and emotional effects in narrations. But more importantly, stories about death seem to have an existential importance to our lives. Stories provide fictional encounters with death and give meaning for both death and life. Thus, death is more than a physical or psychological experience in literature; it also highlights existential questions concerning humanity and storytelling. This volume, entitled Death in Literature, approaches death by examining the narratives and spectacles of death, dying and mortality in different literary genres. The articles consider literary representations of death from ancient Rome to the Netherlands today, and explore ways of dealing with death and dying. The discussions also transcend the boundaries of literature by studying literary representations of such socially relevant and death-related issues as euthanasia and suicide. The articles offer a broad perspective on death’s role in literature as well as literature’s role in the social and cultural debates about death.
Download or read book White Noise written by Don DeLillo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award-winning classic from the author of Underworld and Libra, now a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultramodern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
