Don DeLillo

A FUTURE FOR DELILLO IN LAW AND LITERATURE STUDIES?

MAY 17, 2018 PROFESSORDEROSA

Newsletter 4.1 (2009)

— Hunter Wakefield

Recently there’s been a small flowering of scholarship on DeLillo in the area of law and literature studies. Law Professor, Adam Thurschwell, has been the first scholar, to my knowledge, to ignite this inquiry into DeLillo’s relation to the law. His work has a superficial resemblance to that burgeoning group of legal scholars who have established themselves in the area of postmodernism and law. This group’s work usually flies under the name of Critical Legal Studies (CLS). Many among this group apply Derridean ideas to law in an effort to demonstrate what they see as the ultimate indeterminacy of legal rules and, as a consequence, the judge’s inevitable invention of the law on a case-by-case basis. More radical CLS scholars see the problem as twofold: either the judge applies fixed rules that have little purchase on the ungovernable singularity of the individual case; or the judge, theoretically, has no rule to apply and simply forces his own interpretation on the case at hand, and, in doing so, tailors a rule to fit the case. Because of what they read as a crisis of indeterminacy in law, many in the CLS movement are consciously political and look to ethical theories for guidance to legal reasoning. While Thurschwell—from what I’ve read—has never explicitly identified himself with CLS, he has written in publications heavily populated by CLS advocates. And in two recent articles, one on DeLillo and the other on Derrida, he appeals to Levinas’s ethics as a potential guide to the politics that steer legal decision making. Essentially, he reads a Levinasian “otherness” at the core of both DeLillo and Derrida.

Bill Bryson / A Really Short History of Nearly Everything

A Really Short History of Nearly Everything

• • Bill Bryson

  Adapted from A Short History of Nearly Everything, this stunningly illustrated book from the extraordinary Bill Bryson takes us from the Big Bang to the dawn of science, and everything in between.
  Perfect for ages 8 to 80.
  Ever wondered how we got from nothing to something?
  Or thought about how we can weigh the earth?
  Or wanted to reach the edge of the universe?
  Uncover the mysteries of time, space and life on earth in this extraordinary book - a journey from the centre of the planet to the dawn of the dinosaurs, and everything in between.
  And discover our own incredible journey, from single cell to civilisation, including the brilliant (and sometimes very bizarre) scientists who helped us find out the how and why.
  
  

  **************************************************

  
  

  Reviews for A Short History of Nearly Everything:
  'It's the sort of book I would have devoured as a teenager. It might well turn unsuspecting young readers into scientists.' Evening Standard
  'I doubt that a better book for the layman about the findings of modern science has been written' Sunday Telegraph
  'A thoroughly enjoyable, as well as educational, experience. Nobody who reads it will ever look at the world around them in the same way again' Daily Express
  'The very book I have been looking for most of my life' Daily Mail

PENGUIN

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo: What I've Learned

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

Paul Wilson
June 17, 2016

Comic books were the only thing I read as a child. I didn't come from a family of people who had a reading tradition, at least not in English. I lived in a very crowded house, but my Italian-American experience is not the Italian-American experience you understand from films and television shows you may have seen. You may have seen more of those than I have.

Don DeLillo on Tour / "They laugh in Chicago but no in Los Angeles"

Don DeLillo

“THEY LAUGH IN CHICAGO, BUT NOT IN LOS ANGELES”: DON DELILLO ON TOUR

MAY 10, 2018 PROFESSORDEROSA

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

Newsletter 3.1 (2008)
— Julia Apitzsch, Bonn

DeLillo at the movies: Cologne’s Odeon Theatre provided a perfect venue to launch DeLillo’s third reading tour in Germany. Sponsored by the newspaper Die Zeit, the tour went on from Cologne to Hamburg and Berlin, before continuing on to Zurich, Switzerland.

A rare interview with Don DeLillo, one of the titans of American fiction

Don DeLillo

Q&A: A rare interview with Don DeLillo, one of the titans of American fiction

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

By CAROLYN KELLOGG
APRIL 29, 2016

If you want to reach Don DeLillo, don’t try to email him; he doesn’t email. His preferred method of business communication is via fax. He still writes his novels on a typewriter.

That technological reticence notwithstanding, DeLillo is one of the titans of American fiction. The 79-year-old DeLillo is the author of 18 novels, including the National Book Award-winning “White Noise” and the acclaimed bestsellers “Underworld” and “Libra.” In 2004, in a high-profile get, the Ransom Center acquired DeLillo’s papers; in 2015, he was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

DeLillo in the Classroom / Teaching White Noise in Freshman Composition

DELILLO IN THE CLASSROOM: TEACHING WHITE NOISE IN FRESHMAN COMPOSITION

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

MAY 24, 2018 

PROFESSORDEROSA

Newsletter 4.1

— Ryan Sandowicz

As I reflect on teaching White Noise in my freshman composition class, I mostly think of the analysis the novel receives by my students on the final exam.  One student’s thesis reads, “The media subconsciously regulates what they [The Gladney’s] define as real.”  Another reads, “The last chapter… speaks of youthful hope and optimism in regaining order and life under a toxic inspired sunset.” Though there are those thesis statements that drive less thoughtful essays, most students pick up on the themes in some capacity and tend to really understand how this book relates to their own lives.  It doesn’t start this way.  Invariably, since 2005, students initially and hopefully believe they are reading a book that was made into the 2005 movie White Noise. To help move my freshman English students from some typical groans about reading an unfamiliar work of literature not based on a movie to analyzing how a variety of the novel’s themes interact with each other and reflect meaningful contemporary issues, I use a teaching approach that inspires curiosity and challenges how and what they think about the way in which we live our own daily lives.

Don DeLillo / A Defense of Point Omega

A DEFENSE OF POINT OMEGA

JUNE 14, 2018 LAURENWHITEEE

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)


Newsletter 4.2 (2010)

—Paul Giaimo

In light of the recent extreme divergence of reactions as to the quality and value of Don DeLillo’s latest novel, Point Omega, here a defense of the novel is offered in terms of “liberal irony” an idea which finds its origin in the field of philosophy. Richard Rorty defines the liberal ironist in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity as the writer for whom a “sense of human solidarity” is “ a matter of imaginative identification with the details of others’ lives” (Rorty 190). In terms of what we’ve called “the divided opinion” on DeLillo’s Point Omega, the book has been criticized for disabling the reader’s imaginative and compassionate identification with said details because it does not resolve its ambiguous plotlines and seems deliberately to avoid making concrete anti-Iraq war statements – for instance as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did against slavery in the mid-19th century through the use of traditional realist modes of plot and character which condemned the cruelty of slavery through clear portrayals of the same. But it is precisely the ironic strategy of Point Omega to subvert traditional identification with the novel’s details via omission. This strategy forces readers to look for imaginative identification between the sparse details he or she is afforded and significant conditions of the war itself. What we are given is the tragic and forever unexplainable disappearance of Jessie Elster, daughter of Bush-era Iraq mastermind Richard Elster, whose visit to her father provides a temporary respite from his visit with James “Jim” Finley, a documentary filmmaker who wishes to make an Americana-style soliloquy film of Elster as “a flawed character in a chamber drama, justifying his war and condemning the men who made it” (99). The narrative is abruptly truncated when the two return to find nothing left of the gentle Jessica. The inexplicability of her disappearance is complicated by the fact (amongst other causes) that the local sheriff is reluctant to suspect the house caretaker, the only other man to hold a key to Elster’s home where Jessie and the men were staying, because he has known this caretaker for 30 years (82).  Accountability and criminal investigation are obstructed, finally impassibly. As the novel ends with Jessie’s disappearance, the truth of her situation remains an unsolved mystery.

Cryogenics, immortality and the fragility of life / Don DeLillo’s Zero K

Cryogenics, immortality and the fragility of life: Don DeLillo’s Zero K

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

Arin Keeble

Mayo 10, 2016

There is a “cryopreservation” plot, there is sustained reflection on the nature of time, and there are evocations of the Anthropocene and apocalypse. But Don DeLillo’s latest novel Zero K is most resonant in its portraits of characters who are uncertain and unmoored as they confront the immediate realities of ageing and loss.

MEETING DON DELILLO

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

Lauren White

June 28, 2018

Newsletter 5.1 (2011)

—Jesse Kavadlo

On the day of the announcement, friends from all over the country forwarded me link: Don DeLillo would appear in my city to accept the Saint Louis Literary Society Award.  A book signing, talk, interview, and banquet.  Although I heard DeLillo read from Underworld in 1997, he didn’t answer questions or sign books.  All the better, I thought at the time.  I wouldn’t have to decide whether a signature from an author who seems so uncomfortable with the public constituted some kind of literary betrayal.  Yet now I was guiltily, self-consciously, excited.  More than most novels, DeLillo’s work complicates the simple Meet the Author, since, from Americanaonward, DeLillo has complicated the concept of authorship itself.  In Great Jones Street, Ratner’s Star, Underworld, of course Mao II, and now Point Omega, DeLillo has continuously, self-consciously, and ironically questioned the rhetorical triangle between the viewer, the art, and the artist.  Yet his readers can’t be immune to the allure and aura of the author himself.  Bucky Wunderlick’s and Bill Gray’s self-imposed exiles and diatribes against fame couldn’t keep me away.  They just made me feel sheepish about it, then silly for feeling sheepish.