Don DeLillo

Cosa intendiamo con umorismo, e in che misura possiamo parlare di umorismo, oggi? Il concetto che durante il modernismo Luigi Pirandello ha definito come capacità di saper esprimere il «sentimento del contrario» (1908) appare come requisito fondamentale per lo scrittore contemporaneo: uno strumento necessario a chi si adoperi a appresentare la società del soggetto scisso, retta da un’ideologia che si fonda e si costruisce sull’ambivalenza dei messaggi e sulla progressiva incapacità del pubblico medio di riuscire a decifrarli. In questo articolo, attraverso una lettura dei testi tratti da quella che ho individuato come fase maggiore dell’opera di Walter Siti  – i cinque romanzi dell’”autofiction”: Scuola di nudo (1994), Un dolore normale (1997), Troppi paradisi (2006), Resistere non serve a niente (2012), Exit Strategy (2014) – in comparazione con alcuni scrittori a lui contemporanei, ossia Philip Roth, Don DeLillo e Jonathan Coe, nonché attraverso il recupero della lezione umoristica pasoliniana, è mia intenzione ragionare su una possibile teorizzazione di un umorismo ipermoderno, che, paradossalmente, ha conservato le caratteristiche dell’umorismo così come è stato trasmesso dal modernismo, tuttavia anteponendole alla capacità di provocare il riso.

The noun ‘testimony’ has a very strong relationship with truth. As a mode of evidentiary discourse, it is more closely associated with law and church than with the creative field. However, artists too may bear witness, or testify, to public
events. One such artist, I suggest, is Don DeLillo, who gives an account of the 11 September 2001 disaster in New York and its aftermath in Falling Man: A Novel (2007). Though it is fiction, as signalled so clearly in the title of the novel, it can be argued that it offers testimony to at least some aspects of the disaster and its aftermath. But can a work of the imagination also be the statement of a witness, an account of something that is true? Drawing on insights from the writings of Jacques Derrida on ‘truth’ and Michel Foucault on the experience-book, and
through a close reading of DeLillo’s novel, I argue that fiction has the capacity to offer an account of an event that works in a way similar to that of testimony.

In this thesis I offer a new reading of Don DeLillo’s fiction through an engagement with contemporary Marxist literary theory and political economy. Beginning in the 1960s, the thesis traces the launch, expansion, and shattering of DeLillo’s narrative apparatus as it recomposes itself across the genres of the short story, the conspiratorial thriller, the historical novel, and the novel of time. Developing on theories of the novel as a capitalist epic, the thesis takes the insistent appearance of surplus populations in DeLillo’s work as an opportunity to reflect on, but also to revise and reconceptualise, Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. The DeLillo that emerges from this thesis is less an exemplar of postmodernism and more a novelist of the dispossessed whose central representational task is the invention of a multitude. Chapter One contends that DeLillo’s early short stories from the 1960s acquire a new recognisability in the wake of his late turn towards an aesthetic of suspension. The chapter questions whether the forms of stasis depicted in DeLillo’s short fiction generate new historical futures or if they contribute to a de-collectivised eternal present that later consumes his work. Chapter Two addresses DeLillo’s off-kilter conspiracy novels and reads their discovery of pockets of uneven development through and against the concept of ‘cognitive mapping’. Chapter Three examines the formal means by which DeLillo appropriates Georg Lukács’s classic account of the historical novel and reconfigures it through an irrational historicism that hinges on the non-presupposition of the people. Chapter Four considers the extent to which the non-anthropogenic subjects of history that constrain and inform DeLillo’s twenty-first century fiction constitute political resignation or if they intimate historical futures beyond a catastrophic present. The thesis concludes with a brief reflection on passages out of DeLillo’s epic representation of capitalism.

Posthuman Suffering investigates the core assumptions of posthumanist discourse via philosophy, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and close textual and filmic readings of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Steven Spielberg's film, AI: Artificial Intelligence, bringing the more ontological and epistemological implications of posthumanism to the forefront. In the age of technology our own limitations are legitimized as unique to the human condition.

This essay compares Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and Don DeLillo's "Underworld," by tracking the evolution of paranoia as a cultural pathology typical of the U.S.A. during the second half of the Twentieth century. By deconstructing the popular language of conspiracy theories, both novels testify to the passage from the polarized - and strategic - plot enforced during the Cold War, to a constant state of ironic and self-conscious "dietrologia" in the Nineties. In different ways Pynchon and DeLillo underline the loss of subjectivity in an age characterized by systems so complex that they defy any attempt to attribute individual responsibilities.

This essay examines the loop of contemporary American literary production and reception. Firstly, I read Nam Le's 'Meeting Elise,' from The Boat (2008), Le's much-awarded collection of short stories set across the globe, alongside Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003), a novel that depicts the daylong journey in a limousine of a billionaire currency trader down New York's 47th St. Secondly, I compare Le's and DeLillo's different cosmopolitanisms against the cosmopolitan scene of New York City book reviews. I argue that a graphic depiction of pain and the male body-a 'patriarchy of pain'-reveals a tension between the local and the transnational in the field of contemporary literature and reception, and that this tension reflects and informs the how the field bestows and withholds value. Le and DeLillo, I argue, as figures of different cosmopolitanisms, further complicate matters. What Donald C. Goellnicht has called Le's 'refugee cosmopolitanism' is regarded differently than DeLillo's New York, older cosmopolitanism. The regard of difference demonstrates a continuation of the older mode as it encounters the newer mode. This creates a hierarchy to the scene of the cosmopolitanism of the New York book reviews, what I call 'hierarchical cosmopolitanism,' one that confers value to those it admits.

In his article on Don DeLillo’s novel 'Ratner’s Star' G. S. Allen describes terrorism as a language that is constantly dismissed by society’s interior discourse as incomprehensible and “insane“. It rejects any concerted idiom and does not belong to the sphere of possible enunciations. Although terrorism – like any other communication – is a manipulation of symbols, it therefore has to be mediated in order to become audible/visible. In the first instance this allows to retrace the close interdependence of terrorism and media representations, the impact of reports and images trying to “translate” the violent statement, as well as the terrorist tactics of staging their acts for media consumption. In addition Allen’s thesis implicitly calls on the arts and literature as inter- and possibly transdiscoursive tools “that produce a vent in the canopy of conventions and beliefs in order to admit a little free and windy chaos.” Thus, artistic practice might realize the bridging between the otherwise indiscernible fact of terrorism and public perception and at the same time is essentially qualified to reflect on its own strategies of visualization.
While certainly all of DeLillo’s fiction is characterized by such critical reflection, his early short story 'The Uniforms' foregrounds the respective mediation process in an outstanding way. The text does not directly refer to terrorism but to an intermediary representational system; it is a loose “transcription” of Jean-Luc Godard’s movie 'Weekend' (1969) whose protagonists happen to be kidnapped by a band of antibourgeois and ultra violent Hippie-terrorists. The film’s random atrocities, its main motifs, distanced narrative attitude and fragmented montage style are unvariably adopted by DeLillo. However, the story does not simply repeat the movie but inserts a referential stance by emphasizing its derivational and meta-character. Moreover, it accentuates the rhetorical as well as ideological implications of mediating terrorism by turning Godard’s “theoretical rifle” (R. Stam) against the director himself: 'The Uniforms' hyperbolizes the formal traits of 'Weekend' in such a way that Godard’s movie is shown to transform terrorism – or any political action – into pure aestheticism and thereby ironically becomes a terrorist act itself.
Similarly, Don DeLillo’s latest short story 'Baader-Meinhof' deals with terrorism as a phenomenon filtered by visual media and then re-mediated by literature. In order to display the inexpressible content of terrorist and state violence and at the same time install an allegory for the failure of interpersonal communication, it refers to the 'October 18, 1977' series of paintings by Gerhard Richter which in turn is based on newspaper and police photographs of the RAF-terrorists killed at Stammheim. But in contrast to the earlier text that exposes the aspect of aesthetic trivialization in any artistic rendition of violence as well as in terrorism itself, Baader- Meinhof seems to advance another view: here, painting and literature appear as paradoxical amplifying systems which – precisely because they abstract from the “real” – are predestined to reach out for its unrepresentable chora.

Quels effets la violence économique produit-elle sur les individus ? Peut-on y résister par des moyens qui soient à la hauteur des oppressions subies, mais qui ne disqualifient pas l'action en la faisant participer à une spirale de violence ? Cet article analyse des romans et des films qui représentent le capitalisme industriel ("A Touch of Sin" de Jia Zhangke, "Des châteaux qui brûlent" d'Arno Bertina), et le capitalisme financiarisé ("Cosmopolis" de Don DeLillo, "Margin Call" de J. C. Chandor). Dans ces fictions, il semble que la violence que les sujets incorporent soit condamnée à s'extérioriser de nouveau, sous des formes destructrices ou autodestructrices qui se prêtent à l'esthétisation. L'articulation des violences reproduit les inégalités de classes : là où la violence structurelle, légalisée et naturalisée, opère à travers des intermédiaires, la violence subjective qu'utilisent les dominés est physique, immédiate et aussitôt condamnable. Chez Bertina et DeLillo, la performance et la carnavalisation du monde peuvent être des vecteurs au moins momentanés de la contestation. Chez Jia Zhangke et Chandor prédominent les replis individualistes et les fuites en avant. En explorant quelques moments-clés de ces fictions, l'enjeu est de déterminer selon quels principes la violence économique se reproduit et se métamorphose.

There is an elementary dichotomy that has been created as a result of an elementary date in American history. November 22, 1963 was a sunny day in Dallas before the crisp blue sky transformed into the sardonic backdrop for one of the American century’s most notorious incidents. The deadly shots fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade transformed the afternoon’s cheerful mood into a state of permanent national trauma and cultural disruption that has not only permeated the roots of the postmodern age, but has frequently been described as one of its founding pillars. In fact, the assassination of John F. Kennedy has elicited an “aberration in the heartland of the real” (DeLillo 15) as it challenged our perception of a coherent social and cultural reality, fragmenting in its wake the ideology of an apposite framework of historical cohesion and causality where we can no longer expect “the future to make as much sense as the past” (23).  As a result, a plethora of different versions of reality about the “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” (181) have materialized. These span across conspiracy theories accusing the CIA, FBI, military-industrial complex, Cuban hit men, or the mafia, to the official historical reality laid down in the Warren Report blaming the Marxist “lone gunman” Lee Harvey Oswald and leaving us with a number of dichotomies that are similarly plain and clear as said November day’s skies, yet at the same time equivalent to an impenetrable web of secrets. However, as the novel Libra suggests, JFK’s assassination not only confronted our culture with the improbable task of selecting between the basic antinomies of contingency versus conspiracy and objective order versus secret manipulation. Conversely, through its narrative structure, characterization, and symbolism Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) uncovers coincidence and randomness as the hidden intersection between the dubious official reality of the Kennedy assassination, and the vast dimension of supposedly fictional conspiracy surrounding this traumatic event.

This paper analyzes the rise of a new realist outlook among authors otherwise associated with postmodernism–Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston, James Ellroy. The argument starts out from the assumption that realism in a postmodern context, instead of designating the adequation to truth, refers rather to the pragmatic effort to improve the conditions of one's round of life. The three novelists analyzed here depict characters who have endured trauma or suffered loss and have neverthelees managed to find ways to make their own and other people's life easier. It is through this pragmatic effort that they explore and reshape their world, thus achieving a realist mode of social insertion. Contemporary pragmatic realism, the paper suggests, resonates with the neo-pragmatist discourse that has characterized Anglo-Saxon cultural theory for several decades. It also testifies to an evolution within contemporary culture–a movement away from pure metafiction and intertextuality toward a reappraisal of what constitutes the real with regard to language. The first part of the argument focuses on the paradigms of reference developed in the corpus defined above. The present analysis suggests indeed that pragmatic realism cannot limit itself to an unreflecting exploration of the manifest structures of everyday life: it needs to legitimate its pragmatic outlook by making plain that the latter is the only viable option in an age of ontological skepticism, where the very possibility of realism and reference has been questioned. It is argued in this respect that the three novelists display a less dogmatic attitude toward reference than that which is commonly attributed to postmodernism. In a gesture that harks back to pre-WWII modernism, the writers discussed here make allowances for moments of revelation which may be called epiphanies of the real. As in modernism, however, epiphanies of the real offer no lasting ground for cognitive or moral truth. Pragmatic commitment constitutes therefore a compensation for the impossibility to grasp the real in its totality. Simultaneously, the contemplative dimension of the novels–their reflections on reference and discourse--offer the guarantee of the existential integrity of their devotion to social usefulness. The second part of the argument analyzes the discursive strategies on which contemporary pragmatic realism relies. The paper focuses on the three novelists’s construction of a realist discourse that partly draws on genres–romance, the supernatural– traditionally regarded as antireferential. By the same token, the argument defines the status of the novels analysed here with regard to magic realism–a genre that has sometimes been described as the most emblematic realist discourse of postmodernity.

Il saggio cerca di osservare le interazioni fra tre modi narrativi: il modo epico e due versioni del "modo romanzesco", uno che si rifà al romance, l'altro al novel. Si vuole illustrare come ogni modo abbia una sua peculiare tendenza a un tipo di rappresentazione – intensiva o estensiva – che influisce sui caratteri formali, oltre che contenutistici. Inoltre si osserva l'evoluzione di questi modi nella narrativa contemporanea (con particolare attenzione a 2666 di Roberto Bolaño, Underworld di Don De Lillo, Troppi paradisi di Walter Siti) in relazione a problemi culturali più ampi e generali, come la crisi delle strutture di mediazione.

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s innovative structure sees chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter, that is, without ghost writing.

"Like all multi-lingual computing, Arabic computing is now firmly in the domain of Unicode. Unicode is an industrial protocol with the status of international agreement. It is designed to encode the elements of all known script systems in such a way that they become interchangeable between programs and operating systems. Its implementation is well underway.

Unicode eliminates the need to tamper with fonts to get special characters, but it is not a font. For legible text on screen and paper, Unicode depends on compatible fonts with the required characters, where necessary with additional dedicated font technology."

Gilles Lipovetsky defines the present times as hypermodern. He distances himself from the overly simplistic definitions many give them and embraces their contradictions by bringing out ‘the full complexity of reality’ (Lipovetsky et al., 2005, p.2). Such pluralist understanding of the world in all its paradoxes is also the crucial aim of the metamodern trend. In this regard, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, in their manifesto, define such aspect as the capacity of continuously “oscillating” between Modernism and Postmodernism’s ideals (Vermeulen and van der Akker, 2010). Starting from the explanation of both movements, I will relate them to metamodernism and also to Kant’s philosophy, illustrating differences and affinities. Further, I will use Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003) and its cinematographic adaptation, and Wes Anderson and Paolo Sorrentino’s movies to illustrate the concepts of time and irony and also the new generation - called generation y - in relation to the metamodern atmosphere.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the discursive practices in DeLillo's Point Omega, focusing on the philosophical, scientific and cultural subtexts, reflected in the alterations of the spatial and temporal relations. Meditative segments of DeLillo's novel are based on the contemplations on consciousness and its evolution, intellect, and the ontology of Oneness. These considerations are theoretically based on Pierre de Chardin's philosophical concept of Omega Point, noosphere, and the all-encompassing consciousness, a philosophy that represents a basis for much thought on quantum physics, trans/posthumanism, as another metanarative. The paper will find the relation of time and consciousness in the novel through examining slow-motion movie 24 Hour Psycho, and the desert narrative, by using the theoretical framework of Bergson's duration, Bakhtin's chronotope, and Deleuze's theory of cinema.

This term paper constitutes the attempt to display the emergence of fiction written after the terrorist attacks with regard to Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. Not only, will it focus on the novel as an embodiment of the dramatic aftermath for the American society, but first and foremost on the effects this event has had on the characters of the book. The paper will examine how the atmosphere of melancholia and hopelessness is created and will for that focus on lexical aspects rather that stylistic devices. Falling Man provides an impression of the numbness, confusion and trauma1 the survivors of the attacks lived through which is only one of the reasons it has been criticized by people ever since the novel was published in 2007.

This essay investigates how the setting plays a crucial role in developing Jack Gladney as a character in White Noise and criticizing the “typical” landscape of American suburb. Marc Augé’s theory about non-places—functional places for transport, transit, commerce, and leisure—sheds a new light on the setting as an exclusively functional space filled with non-places. This article discusses how some places that Jack frequently visits such as the shopping mall, the supermarket, his own automobile, and his home are portrayed as non-places. In these places, Jack cannot have a real connection with his family but lives under an illusion that he does. In non-places, his identity is something transitional; whether it is a consumer or the head of the Hitler Studies, it is all a role-playing, which makes him anxious. In the timeless, sealed-off world of Blacksmith, he believes that he is safe and protected from the Real, but he also sense its invisible presence. After learning about his impending death in the evacuation camp, another form of non-places, he awakens from illusion and ignorance and attempts to transgress the frontier between places and non-places. This essay pays special attention to the last chapter of the novel and discusses how the ending with Wilder’s crossing the expressway, Jack’s watching the sunset on the overpass, and the consumers’ confusion in the supermarket suggest that the frontiers start being recognized and bring disturbances to the non-places in White Noise.

The present paper analyzes the concept of fear of death in Don DeLillo's novels White Noise and Cosmopolis, emphasizing the representations of this feeling in relation to television and economic life, respectively. While the Gladney family subconsciously attempted to escape the linear progression of time towards death by gathering in front of the TV set every Friday night, Eric Parker sought to overcome the fear of death by means of the accumulation of material possessions, as well as prestige. DeLillo's novel White Noise is a novel caught up in the web spun by the global economic features of late postmodernism, while underlining the effects of mass media on the everyday lives of American characters living in the fictional town of Blacksmith. Cosmopolis, published in 2003, was written after the tragic events of 9/11. However, it is not the story of a national catastrophy, but of a personal tragedy, the death of a 28 year old millionaire called Eric Parker. If in White Noise one infers the centrality of television to the American characters' lives, in Cosmopolis, the reader is provided with an economic outlook on the world. The consequence of the economic phenomenon on literary aesthetics is that globalized economy dominates aesthetic production. Materially wealthy, but spiritually vacuous, Eric Parker exemplifies modern decadence, whose finality is death itself.

Don DeLillo's 9/11 novel, Falling Man (2007), shows a sophisticated engagement with the contested swirl of images and politics that came in the aftermath of the event. The novel's complex strategies of ekphrasis – of verbally, linguistically representing visual codes and optic frames of reference – explicitly stage questions of representational form in the aftermath of collective trauma. DeLillo's ultimate choice of performance art as the medium through which his novel's characters encounter authentic representations of 9/11 functions as a fictional engagement with New York City's contentious public arguments about collective memory, urban space, and memorials. I argue that ekphrastically embedding bodily performance within fiction critically enforces a slowing down of the perceptual process of representation, and attempts to arrest the speed at which the imagery of 9/11 (falling bodies, burning towers) became reified into state power.

«Una spallata al fotografo»: il ritratto fotografico e la fotografia come scrittura. Michele Smargiassi affirmed that the novelists, who believe in the primacy of the word over the image, always try to go beyond the photographs to find hidden meanings in it. Objecting to this affirmation, on the one hand, this essay analyzes some literary works where the use of photography can be read in a me-tafictional key (see the use of fictional photographers from Hawthorne to Tournier and DeLillo). On the other hand, works whose very texture can be defined as 'photographic' are taken into account (see the use of light, cut, framing and the very poetics of authors like, for instance, Henry James and Geoff Dyer). Le immagini, per gli artigiani di parole, sono informatori indisciplinati e invadenti, assistenti di palco efficienti, ma che se non li tieni al loro posto minacciano di rubarti la scena. Le fotografie, per gli scrittori, sono stanze da attraversare senza fermarsi, ascensori in cui è vietato sedersi, per non restarci intrappolati. 1 Così scriveva Michele Smargiassi alcuni anni or sono nel suo blog, sottolineando come gli autori di narrativa, nutrendo la presunzione del primato della parola sull'immagine, si pongano in atteggiamento competitivo nei confronti della fotografia. Dopo aver rilevato che la maggior parte degli autori non vede l'immagine, ma vede solo attraverso l'immagi-ne, e cerca quindi di andare oltre la foto per individuar-ne significati reconditi che solo la parola sarebbe in gra-do di cogliere, Smargiassi concludeva: «Questi scrittori si tuffano nell'immagine fotografica dando una spallata brutale al fotografo». 2 Se questo è l'atteggiamento più comune dei romanzieri nei confronti della fotografia (e lo dimostrerebbe la famosa-per non dire famigerata-affermazione di William Saroyan secondo cui una foto vale più di mille parole solo a patto che qualcuno le pro-nunci) va tuttavia rilevato che nel corso del tempo molti scrittori hanno posto al centro dei loro romanzi, in fun-zione squisitamente metanarrativa, figure di fotografi, ovvero hanno usato la fotografia come mise en abyme non solo del testo, ma della stessa scrittura. Già nel 1851, neppure una dozzina d'anni dopo quel 1839 che vide il riconoscimento ufficiale della dagher-rotipia da parte del governo francese, negli Stati Uniti, Nathaniel Hawthorne, affidando a un dagherrotipista, Holgrave, lo scioglimento del mistero al centro del suo romanzo The House of the Seven Gables (La casa dei sette abbaini), riconosceva l'importanza della fotografia, ancora guar-data con diffidenza dai suoi contemporanei, incerti se considerarla un manufatto scien-41 n. 12, luglio-dicembre 2018

This paper refers to my correspondence and conversations with Mr. DeLillo. I begin by describing the Don DeLillo Conference "Fiction Rescues History" in Paris in 2016, which Mr. DeLillo attended. I then turn to Point Omega, which highlights the work of Douglas Gordon, the video-maker who appropriated Hitchcock's Psycho by slowing it down to 2 frames per second in his 24 Hour Psycho. But another film is equally important in Point Omega: Errol Morris's The Fog of War, which reveals the evasions and delusions of Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War. He is one of two models for Richard Elster, DeLillo's Iraq War analyst. (The other model is Donald Rumsfeld.) Point Omega has been viewed as a "thin" novel, but by invoking Vietnam, DeLillo puts the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in tragic perspective. His collaborations with Douglas Gordon and Errol Morris revolve around their shared interest in history, the ethics of spectatorship, and cinema's impact on the human mind.

This research looks at Don DeLillo’s shortest novel by considering body and time as the two factors that are essential in order to understand the existential path that the book outlines. The aim is to provide a new interpretation of the novel, able to highlight its real-life concern for traumatic mourning, particularly in response to the suicide of an intimate. The literary study focuses on the journey started by the protagonist, the body artist Lauren Hartke, after the suicide of her husband, a journey that goes through the uncanny spaces which shape our existence as human beings. In fact, in The Body Artist DeLillo registers the impact of loss as the ‘ghostin’ of the living, not the dead, who are on their own, with whatever arts are at their disposal to live what cannot be explained or shown, discovered or imagined – only known. The analysis of the novel examines how and why does the work of addressing trauma go through the body, as much as the mind, and investigates how time comes to be the spatial dimension where our inner self moves in order to re-gain possession of itself. As a result, it is no surprising that Body Time is also the title of Lauren’s latest performance: that is, ‘Body’ and ‘Time’ are the two elements she needs to renew herself, the two places she must travel through if she wants to live again. Two places that end up in being one only.

Il presente lavoro analizza due romanzi dello scrittore statunitense Don DeLillo (New York, 1936): 'Libra' (1988) e 'Falling Man' (2007). Le vicende narrate ripercorrono due tra i più sconvolgenti traumi vissuti dall’America negli ultimi sessant’anni: rispettivamente, l’assassinio di J.F. Kennedy e il crollo delle Torri Gemelle. Nonostante per temi e intenti entrambe le opere possano definirsi "trauma novels", l’autore ha adottato tecniche di narrazione molto diverse, che, nel caso di 'Falling Man', lo hanno esposto a numerose critiche.
A partire da un’indagine puntuale dei testi si tenterà di dimostrare come i romanzi si prefiggano propositi differenti: in 'Libra', per mezzo di una minuziosa ricostruzione del piano e della messa a punto dell’assassinio, è raccontato il crollo di un’epoca, ponendo l’accento sulla dimensione culturale e collettiva del trauma. In 'Falling Man' la dinamica degli eventi passa in secondo piano e la narrazione si concentra attorno allo shock psichico e individuale che ha colpito i singoli esseri umani.

Abstract
Il saggio analizza il rapporto tra individuo e tempo nella letteratura americana contemporanea attraverso una selezione di autori (Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut) che esplorano i modi in cui memoria, esperienza del presente e capacità di proiettare il futuro interagiscono tra loro e con i traumi individuali e collettivi della nostra epoca, determinando così la percezione della realtà. I loro romanzi testimoniano di come l’attività narrativa sia uno strumento fondamentale per osservare il processo di ricostruzione dell’io, un percorso a cui ho dato il nome di “wilderness of time experience”.
Abstract
My essay examines the relation between the self and time in contemporary American literature. I have selected four authors (Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut) whose works deal with the ways in which memory, experience of the present, and projection of the future interact with each other and with the personal and collective traumas of our times, thus crucially affecting the perception of reality. These novels testify to narrative’s ability of exploring the process of reconstruction of the self—a path that I named “wilderness of time experience.”

In this paper we shall make endeavors to scrutinize the fear of death from different angles and to give as many examples of it from DeLillo’s book White Noise. This book captures so wonderfully the essence of a postmodern America in which people have seemingly learned to live surrounded by modern calamities, and yet they still carry their inborn primitive fears of dying and perishing. While trying to figure out whether the characters have any legitimate reasons to fear death to such extent, we shall take into account technology to which most of them are dependent on, the changed environment they live in; conspiracy theories connected to that very environment, and of course the form of destructive consumerism which can be related to over-excessiveness and ‘waste’ - infallible attributes of a postmodern society, together with the specific language it creates. Besides references to the book, we will also present two movies dealing with this topic and furthermore we shall introduce the notion of singularity, the notion originally belonging to the sphere of physics and mathematics, but used here to explain the postmodern strivings for trans-humanity in which technological intelligence gains supremacy over the human intelligence. Also, having some modernistic qualities to it, the novel has its moments where psychology can step up in attempts to explain the loss of self, the faith and God. Finally we shall speak of some possible solutions to the problems of disintegrated personality, facilitated perhaps by the very process of individuation.

This monograph provides a chronological overview of the campus novel from the 1950s to the early 21st century. All of the six chapters compare two representative texts from each decade—one British and one American. The findings show that the authors of American campus novels (e.g. Nabokov, Malamud, and DeLillo) are more diverse than their British counterparts (e.g. Amis, Bradbury, and Lodge). The monograph also addresses the coexistence of the comic and the satirical within the genre. The conclusion emphasizes that although Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, one of the most recent campus novels, can hardly be characterized as a comic novel, all of the texts analyzed in this volume are satirical in their effect, as they try to name and potentially reform various problematic aspects of academia.

DeLillo's novel 'White Noise' illustrates how postmodern consumerist culture invades all experience relating to perception of individual personal identity, allowing capitalist corporations to control the most private aspects of personal lives.

Çeviren: Murat Erşen
Bölüm: Korku Politikaları

Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
REDİNGOT KİTAP
Güvenlik kameraları. Havaalanı güvenlik şeritleri. Kepenkleri indirilmiş mağaza vitrinleri. Toplumsal korkunun tezahürleriyle her gün karşılaşıyoruz. Haber bültenleri sürekli dört bir yanımızı kuşatan binbir türlü tehlikeden ve içimizdeki kötü bir şeyler olacak hissini durmadan körükleyen artan terör tehdidinden bahsediyor. Korkunun Felsefesi bu güçlü duygunun altında yatan fikirleri ve arkasında saklanan sorunları araştırırken, korkunun nasıl ve neden modern hayatın her çatlağından içeri sızdığını soruşturuyor.
Korkunun doğasını keşfetmek için bilimi, politikayı, sosyolojiyi ve edebiyatı didik didik ediyor. Yüzünü siyasi ve toplumsal âleme çevirerek Machiavelli ile Hobbes'un felsefelerinde korkunun rolüne eğiliyor. Süregiden "terör savaşları"nda korkunun politik kullanımı ve çağımızı tanımlayan daimi alarm halinden kendimizi kurtarmanın mümkün olup olmadığını sorguluyor.
Svendsen, hümanist iyimserliğin izlerini taşıyan daha aydınlık, daha az ürkütücü bir geleceğin imkânını tartışıyor. İsabetli ve kışkırtıcı saptamalarıyla kendi insanlık halimizi ve çağımızın mevcut durumunu düşünmeye iten Korkunun Felsefesi, hayali ve gerçek tehlikeleri sarmalayan örtüyü kaldırarak bizi korkularımızla yüzleşmeye zorluyor.