Don DeLillo has spent his career reflecting upon the creative processes of artists. In recent years he has become increasingly drawn to spectators and how they project and indulge their own private obsessions through art. The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo is the first book devoted to this dimension of DeLillo's art. It is also the first book to identify and analyze a signature DeLillo motif: the embedded author. In multiple novels, short stories, and plays, DeLillo inserts a character subtly implied as the creator of the very narrative we are reading or watching. Spanning his entire career but focusing primarily on his work from Underworld (1997) to Zero K (2016), The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo breaks important new ground in DeLillo studies.

Don DeLillo has spent his career reflecting upon the creative processes of artists. In recent years he has become increasingly drawn to spectators and how they project and indulge their own private obsessions through art. The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo is the first book devoted to this dimension of DeLillo's art. It is also the first book to identify and analyze a signature DeLillo motif: the embedded author. In multiple novels, short stories, and plays, DeLillo inserts a character subtly implied as the creator of the very narrative we are reading or watching. Spanning his entire career but focusing primarily on his work from Underworld (1997) to Zero K (2016), The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo breaks important new ground in DeLillo studies.

Theorizes the development of a minimalist mode in American fiction since 1970, frequently seen to interrogate US postmodernity. Minimalism and Affect in American Literature, 1970-2020 responds to existing studies of literary minimalism by pursuing three original and interrelated objectives. It provides a more inclusive and precise definition of minimalism that enables further inquiry into the mode. It also exposes the presence of minimalism beyond critical demarcations that attempt to limit the aesthetic to a particular school, medium, movement, form or decade. Finally, it argues that writers of American literary minimalism are uniquely privileged in their ability to formalize precarity and threatening cultural currents into the fragile construct that is ordinary life. Building upon theories of affect and the everyday, Minimalism and Affect in American Literature, 1970-2020 analyses minimalist aesthetics within the works of canonical minimalists alongside writers more frequently associated with other movements. Through readings of Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, Raymond Carver, Paul Auster and Don DeLillo, among others, and cultural phenomena ranging from sedation to telephony, this book exposes the persistence and political importance of minimalism within American literature from the 20th century into the 21st.

Interested in the ideological workings of fiction, I study how major avant-garde tropes promote the potential of permanent renewal as white America’s property. Renewal ties to the capacities to create, progress, transcend, and simply be. From Black critique we know that, within dominant discourse, all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since colonization. Black work has been fetishized, appropriated, stolen, and dismissed in and by dominant culture, while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity, transformative potential, and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation, these images are often viewed as separate constructions. This project shows that, deriving from white ideology, such representations are symbiotic and simultaneous - the "good" story of white renewal rests on the continual transgression towards Black being.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: ÿ (1), University of Graz (Institute for American Studies), language: English, abstract: Underworld (1997), DeLillos elfter Roman, ist bis dato sein ehrgeizigstes Projekt. In diesem 827-seitigen Nachruf auf den Kalten Krieg vereint und verdichtet er viele der Themen seiner schriftstellerischen Karriere: Verschwörungstheorien und Formen der Paranoia, atomare Bedrohung, das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen fiktionalem Erzählen und Historiographie, die Fragmentarisierung der grands récits, Onomastik und die Macht der Sprache; der Einfluss des Films, des Fernsehens und der Werbung auf unsere alltägliche Wirklichkeitswahrnehmung wie auch auf künstlerisches Schaffen, Jean Baudrillards Simulakrum; Gewalt und die unterschwellige Faszination, die die Medienberichterstattung über Naturkatastrophen, Terrorakte, Serienmörder, Amokläufer, Flugzeugabstürze und dergleichen auf uns ausübt; Sport; Homophobie, der Konsumwahn und die Macht des multinationalen Kapitals; Kunst und die Frage, ob subversive Kunst, Kunst die gesellschaftlich noch etwas bewegen kann, in einem soziokulturellen Rahmen, den wir grob mit den Begriffen Postmoderne oder Spätkapitalismus umreißen können, noch möglich ist; und schließlich noch Müll als empirisches Faktum und als große historische, psychoanalytische und ästhetische Metapher. Eine Metapher, die fast jeden Aspekt des Romans in sich vereinigt. Müll ist im buchstäblichen Sinne und als Metapher nahezu allgegenwärtig und dient in der Diskussion der vielschichtigen und weitverzweigten historischen, politischen und ästhetischen Implikationen von Underworld als allumfassendes Bild. Der aus unser aller Alltag wohlbekannte Begriff des Recycling, und Containment, ein Wort, das etwa im Begriff „Müllcontainer“ schon längst Bestandteil auch der deutschen Sprache ist, bilden dabei das Grundgerüst dieser Betrachtung.

A disastrous error on the field sends five lives into a tailspin in this widely acclaimed tale about love, life, and baseball, praised by the New York Times as "wonderful...a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting." Named one of the year's best books by the New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg, Kansas City Star, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Time Out New York. At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment -- to oneself and to others. "First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom." --Jonathan Franzen

A stunning novel by the bestselling National Book Award–winning author of White Noise and Underworld. Since the publication of his first novel Americana, Don DeLillo has lived in the skin of our times. He has found a voice for the forgotten souls who haunt the fringes of our culture and for its larger-than-life, real-life figures. His language is defiantly, radiantly American. In The Body Artist his spare, seductive twelfth novel, he inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits of the body. Lauren is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life. Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time, love and human perception. The Body Artist is a haunting, beautiful and profoundly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.