Understanding Don DeLillo

Henry Veggian

Description

Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half-century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998).

Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns—the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power—and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques.

Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his "modular" working method as well as the evolution of his novels.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• White Noise
• América
• The Falling Man
• Great Jones Street
• End Zone
• White noise (disambiguation)
• Mao II
• General officer
• Cosmopolis
• General
• American
• Americana
• La Voix des morts (film)

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 10 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611174458
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING DON DELILLO
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
Volumes on
Edward Albee | Sherman Alexie | Nelson Algren
Paul Auster | Nicholson Baker | John Barth | Donald Barthelme
The Beats | Thomas Berger | The Black Mountain Poets
Robert Bly | T. C. Boyle | Truman Capote | Raymond Carver
Michael Chabon | Fred Chappell | Chicano Literature
Contemporary American Drama | Contemporary American Horror Fiction
Contemporary American Literary Theory
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1926-1970
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1970-2000
Contemporary Chicana Literature | Robert Coover | Don DeLillo
Philip K. Dick | James Dickey | E. L. Doctorow | Rita Dove | Dave Eggers
John Gardner | George Garrett | Tim Gautreaux | John Hawkes
Joseph Heller | Lillian Hellman | Beth Henley | James Leo Herlihy
David Henry Hwang | John Irving | Randall Jarrell | Charles Johnson
Diane Johnson | Adrienne Kennedy | William Kennedy | Jack Kerouac
Jamaica Kincaid | Etheridge Knight | Tony Kushner | Ursula K. Le Guin
Denise Levertov | Bernard Malamud | David Mamet | Bobbie Ann Mason
Colum McCann | Cormac McCarthy | Jill McCorkle | Carson McCullers
W. S. Merwin | Arthur Miller | Steven Millhauser | Lorrie Moore
Toni Morrison s Fiction | Vladimir Nabokov | Gloria Naylor
Joyce Carol Oates | Tim O Brien | Flannery O Connor | Cynthia Ozick
Suzan-Lori Parks | Walker Percy | Katherine Anne Porter | Richard Powers
Reynolds Price | Annie Proulx | Thomas Pynchon | Theodore Roethke
Philip Roth | Richard Russo | May Sarton | Hubert Selby, Jr.
Mary Lee Settle | Sam Shepard | Neil Simon | Isaac Bashevis Singer
Jane Smiley | Gary Snyder | William Stafford | Robert Stone | Anne Tyler
Gerald Vizenor | Kurt Vonnegut | David Foster Wallace | Robert Penn
Warren | James Welch | Eudora Welty | Colson Whitehead
Tennessee Williams | August Wilson | Charles Wright
UNDERSTANDING
DON DELILLO
Henry Veggian
2015 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN: 978-1-61117-445-8 (ebook)
Jacket photograph: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times/Redux
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Understanding Don DeLillo
Chapter 2
Jargon and Genre: Americana, End Zone , and Great Jones Street
Chapter 3
Opacity and Transparency: White Noise and Mao II
Chapter 4
Artists and Prophets: The Body Artist, Cosmopolis , and Falling Man
Chapter 5
With, to, and against the Novel: The Short Stories
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
PREFACE
Raised by the newspaper and the broadsheet, the pamphlet and the poem, the first American novelists were bound to the print culture of the late eighteenth century. Who can read Charles Brockden Brown or Susanna Haswell Rowson and not be reminded that Philadelphia, the young nation s first great cultural center, was perched at the edge of a boundless forest whose mineral resources a royal decree had once prevented from being made into a printing press? And even after the fact, when a press was eventually permitted in Philadelphia, it was entrusted only to a Royalist named William Bradford, a man whose son was also a printer and later a rival to Benjamin Franklin. If Poor Richard freely gave advice, his type had come at no small risk or cost, as Franklin was forced to sail to England to purchase the machinery required to make books. Memory of the precarious and adversarial circumstances of the colonial press lingered until after the American War of Independence, and it underscores the cautionary tones of post-Revolutionary writers such as Brown and Rowson. Novelists suspected that should the public stop reading, a print culture won by the pen would be reclaimed by the sword.
The republic s young novelists quickly encountered another and perhaps unexpected difficulty: a crowded literary market. Rowson confirms as much when in the preface to Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (1794) she describes her awareness of being a novel writer, at a time when such a variety of works are ushered into the world under that name. Several decades would pass before the American literary novel would earn lasting critical prestige and a place at the fore of the cultural imaginary. In contrast to its precarious youth, the American novel s history is so pervasive today that towns and cities have nearly become synonymous with certain novelists: Salem, Massachusetts; Hannibal, Missouri; Oxford, Mississippi; Salinas, California. The American novel also travels well: when Thomas Pynchon sets the majority of Gravity s Rainbow (1973) in post-World War II Europe, we do not hesitate to call it an American novel. Conversely, when writers from other national traditions find success in the United States, we welcome their fiction with open arms. Nabokov, Pasternak, Lampedusa, Marquez, Lessing, Coetzee, Saramago, and Pahmuk all recently enjoyed large readerships in America. When a novelist accused of having written a novel flees from persecution and death for having written it, as was the case for Solzhenitsyn and Rushdie, we provide them sanctuary, and we have done so despite (and perhaps to stir) the diplomatic trouble that such hospitality may entail. Even when much has changed, American readers and writers carry to this day a strong vestigial memory of the admonition and doubt that troubled our early novelists. We remember that a national literature must be defended; we remember how the rosebush concluding the first chapter of The Scarlet Letter blooms beside a prison.
We have also arrived at a time when influential critics and commentators acknowledge a decline in the novel s cultural influence and prestige. Jonathan Arac described the matter in a 2009 essay when discussing Chang Rae Lee s novel Native Speaker (1995): I find the novel now a residual form, no longer dominant as it had once seemed some fifty years ago. Arac nonetheless affirms that the residual practice of the novel performs at least one essential cultural task. The novel stands up for the human, in an age that seems to find even more ways to erode humanity. 1 Arac denotes a specific century-from roughly 1850 to 1950-to mark the perimeter and depth of the novel s ferment in the United States and beyond it. One would not dispute that countless readers across the world currently enjoy the labors of novelists and their publishers. Nonetheless there is considerable merit to the claim that the novel is closing a particularly American phase of its history, and not only in America. The possible causes are many. One might say the novel no longer satisfies the ambitions of a nation s youth as it did during the Jazz Age, for the Popular Front, for veterans attending college on the G.I. Bill, or for the Beat generation. Nor is it the surrogate field upon which ideologies waged proxy battles during the Cold War. Blame computers if you will. Managed to respectability, the novel may no longer seem a daring form. That is to say it no longer seems daring if one finds human life, memory, politics, language, history, science, art, emotion, experience, or work to be unremarkable.
Don DeLillo is known primarily for the novels he has produced over the course of a writing career that now spans more than fifty years. Beginning with his first published story in 1960 (his first novel was published in 1971), he has written and regularly published literary fiction during the period of the modern American novel s alleged decline. DeLillo has often visited the question of the novel s status in his fiction and addressed the matter in interviews. He noted in a 1993 interview with Adam Begley: The novel s not