Don DeLillo In Context

This book uses a variety of frameworks to provide readers with ways into understanding Don DeLillo's prodigious body of work.

Jesse Kavadlo (Edited by)

9781316515433, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 June 2022

375 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm, 0.66 kg

Don DeLillo is one of the most important novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Yet despite DeLillo's prolific output and scholarly recognition, much of the attention has gone to his works individually, rather than collectively or thematically. This volume provides separate entries into the wide variety and categories of contexts that surround and help illuminate DeLillo's writings. Don DeLillo in Context examines how geography, biography, history, media studies, culture, philosophy, and the writing process provide critical frameworks and ways of reading and understanding DeLillo's prodigious body of work.

Introduction: Context, content, conflict Jesse Kavadlo
Part I. Places: 1. New York reassessing the topography of newyork city in Don Delillo's fiction Alan Gravano
2. The Bronx Don Delillo's underworlds: mystery and manners Jacqueline A. Zubeck
3. The American Southwest 'Texas is the reason:' running dog, point omega and Delillo's 'southwest' Henry Veggian
4. The World Delillo abroad Cornelius Collins
Part II. History and Politics: 5. The cold war the rules, norms, games, and professions of Delillo's cold war Alan Nadel
6. The John F. Kennedy assassination paranoid suspicions Skip Willman
7. Terrorism terrorism as context in Delillo Margaret Scanlan
8. The twenty-first century March madness: Don Delillo in the age of global interdependence Marni Gauthier
9. Prescience the idea of the future Paul PetrovicI
Part III. Media and Pop Culture: 10. Film Don Delillo, the movie Timothy Parrish
11. Television and mass media 'the nausea of news and traffic' Crystal AlbertsI
12. Plays and performance dramatic contexts Rebecca Rey
13. Sports 'fascinating ways to lose a game' Mike Witcombe
14. The internet everything is connected: Delillo and internet culture Andrew Strombeck
15. Signs print, image, and visual media Joseph Conte
Part IV. Literary Contexts: 16. Intertextuality 'an attempt to find pattern and motive': text, context, intertext Laura Barrett
17. Genre and genre theory bold new forms: genre and the generic Jeffrey Severs
18. Modernism and postmodernism a quantum perspective: modernist depths and post-modernist connections Samuel Chase Coale
19. Postmodernism and literary criticism postmodernism and its discontents, or, the cultural logic of don delillo Katie Muth
Part V. Material Contexts: 20. Technology science/fiction Randy Laist
21. The environment postmodern ecology in Don Delillo's fiction Elise Martucci
22. Materiality violence and the body Rebecca Harding, university of Sussex
23. Death (not) moving deathward: the living and the undead in delillo's late works Mark Osteen
Part VI. Social and Cultural Constructions: 24. Religion and spirituality meditations on mystery Graley Herren
25. Race white male mobility Tim Engles
26. Ethnicity DeLillo and Italian America John Paul Russo
27. Gender masculine and feminine subjectivity Anne Longmuir
28. Time still life Catherine Gander
Part VII. Writing and Writers: 29. The concept of authorship self/referentiality Marjorie Worthington
30. The writing process 'a book determines its own dimensions': observing, writing, typing Harold K. Bush
31. Advertising copywriting aesthetics Aaron DeRosa
Conclusion: DeLillo's literary legacy DeLillo as context David Cowart
Further Reading
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]