Browsing by Subject "Don DeLillo"
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Item Going Paranoid from the Cold War to the Post-Cold War: Conspiracy Fiction of DeLillo, Didion, and Silko(2010-07-14) Lew, SeungThis dissertation proposes to examine the conspiracy narratives of Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Leslie Marmon Silko that retell American experience with the Cold War and its culture of paranoia for the last half of the twentieth century. Witnessing the resurgence of Cold War paranoia and its dramatic twilight during the period from late 70s to mid-80s and the sudden advent of the post-Cold War era that has provoked a volatile mixture of euphoria and melancholia, the work of DeLillo, Didion, and Silko explores the changing mode of Cold War paranoid epistemology and contemplates its conditions of narrative possibility in the post-Cold War era. From his earlier novels such as Players, The Names, and Mao II to his latest novel about 9/11 Falling Man, DeLillo has interrogated how the American paradigm of paranoid national self-fashioning envisioned by Cold War liberals stands up to its equally paranoid post-Cold War nemesis, terrorism. In his epic dramatization of Cold War history in Underworld, DeLillo mythologizes the doomed sense of paranoid connectivity and collective belonging experienced during the Cold War era. In doing so, DeLillo attempts to contain the uncertainty and instability of the post-Cold War or what Francis Fukuyama calls "post-historical" landscape of global cognitive mapping within the nostalgically secured memory of the American crowd who had lived the paranoid history of the Cold War. In her novels that investigate the history of American involvements in the Third World from Eisenhower through Kennedy to Reagan, Didion employs the minimalist narrative style to curb, extenuate, or condense the paranoid narratives of Cold War imperial romance most recently exemplified in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In her latest Cold War romance novel The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion reassesses her earlier narrative tactic of "calculated ellipsis" employed in A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy and seeks to commemorate individual romances behind the spectacles of Cold War myth of frontier. Departing from the rhetoric of "hybrid patriotism" in Ceremony, a Native American story of spiritual healing and lyricism that works to appease white paranoia and guilt associated with the atomic bomb, Silko in Almanac of the Dead seeks to subvert the paranoid regime of Cold War imperialism inflicted upon Native Americans and Third World subjects by mobilizing alternative conspiracy narratives from the storytelling tradition of Native American spirituality. Silko?s postnational spiritual conspiracy gestures toward a global cognitive mapping beyond the American Cold War paradigm of "paranoid oneworldedness".Item Identification beyond the symbolic frame : Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and the rhetorical logics of objects(2012-08) King, Matt R.; Walker, Jeffrey, 1949-; Bremen, Brian A.Rhetorics of identification traditionally address two questions: how does rhetoric work, who or what is involved in rhetorical relations, and how do these relations unfold and proceed, and how can and should we conduct ourselves in light of this state of things, what modes of engagement and response do we have available? Rhetoricians have drawn substantially on Kenneth Burke’s work on symbolic action in answering these questions, but this emphasis on the symbolic does not exhaust the range and nature of rhetorical relations, and other modes of relationality thus warrant our attention. My work aims to consider how our understanding of identification shifts when we move beyond the symbolic frame, when we attend to rhetorical relations without grounding our inquiry in considerations of representation, interpretation, understanding, dialectics, and epistemology. Drawing on conversations in nonrational rhetorics, object-oriented ontology, postmodernism and postmodern literature, digital rhetorics, writing studies, and video game studies, I attend to the material, affective, and singular nature of rhetorical relations. I also consider the modes of engagement this understanding of identification makes available with reference to writing pedagogy and the work of authors Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace.Item Tradition and the individual talents : Dylan, Eliot, and DeLillo(2011-08) Tremel, Justin Robert; Bremen, Brian A.; Davis, Diane; Meikle, Jeff; Nehring, Neil; Hutchison, ColemanDrawing from a variety of multimedia and archival materials, my dissertation involves a three-figure examination of Bob Dylan, T.S. Eliot, and Don DeLillo. These three figures are linked, (as some other critics have noted) through scattered intertextual allusions. But I argue that a more telling correlation exists in the manner in which all three managed to rise to the apex of their respective fields. I examine this phenomenon and in so doing, my project seeks out a composite theoretical model, better suited to explain the multiform artistry of Dylan and to account for the related transformative cultural navigation of Eliot and DeLillo at key points their careers. My dissertation sheds light on these authors drawing on Bourdieu’s model of “the field of cultural production” and Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation:” how print, photography film, and other media appropriate, influence, and reconstitute each other. I reconfigure their concept to focus on individual agency and situate these three as consummate remediators of their own and each other’s work, their individual legacies, and ultimately the very “field of cultural production” itself. This reading recasts our understanding of each author: I position Dylan as a major contemporary literary figure; Eliot as a consummate public performer and recording artist; and DeLillo as a visionary cultural remixer. This analysis provides fresh perspectives on the idea of authorship, canonicity and textuality, as it suggests that a vigorous literary analysis requires us to move beyond a specific medium associated with an author toward a dynamic field of multimodal intertextuality. Literary research and pedagogy in the media-saturated 21st century classroom demand a canon unbound. Such a canon, I argue, should include figures like Dylan, as it should also provoke a fuller, more vital engagement with “the literary tradition” within which we place figures like Eliot and DeLillo. My work, situated at the crossroads between American literature, cultural studies, and the emerging field of the digital humanities, thus produces a more nuanced understanding of the authors in question, the canonical heritage to which they contribute, and the scholarly methods by which we appraise and teach their works.