Representations of Technoculture in Don DeLillo’s Novels

ISBN-13: 9781032526652 / Angielski

Laila Sougri

Opis

It explores the manner in which Don DeLillo’s characters experience technocultural everyday decade after decade. The changing technoculture is  resisted at times by the characters, it points out to a transitional mode of being. This state does not dehumanize DeLillo’s characters as much as reveals their humanity in the postmodern world

This book examines the manifestation of technoculture in everyday life as represented in Don DeLillo’s work. It is argued that DeLillo advocates the weaving of technological suggestions with cultural imperatives. Technology does not eradicate one’s capacity to form spiritual behaviors. DeLillo has spent decades reiterating this point in parallel with technological advance. By anatomizing the American technoculture, the author emphasizes the cultural change that accompanies technological progress. He gives particular attention to the meaning of being human in a time when technology is implicated in most if not all aspects of life.The study discloses various concealed involvements of technoculture in the characters’ everydayness while attempting to dodge technological determinism. Consequently, the study highlights thematic settings wherein technology and culture collaborate rather than subdue to each other. Therefore, technoculture in DeLillo’s novels is read through a broad context. Instances include the everyday use of technology as extension, the implication of image technologies in redefining history, the reconceptualization of the ethical and behavioral aspects of reality, the development of tele-visual and embodied perceptions in various technocultural spaces, and the involvement of information technologies in reconstructing the beliefs, behaviors, and activities of the posthuman.

Spis treści

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Don DeLillo’s Technoculture

The Interrelatedness of Culture and Technology

"Radiance in dailiness"

Prototypical extensions in Ratner’s Star and Zero K

Clearing technological determinism: "they shoot horses, don’t they?"

Breaching the Beyond: Attaining the Extraordinary through the Ordinary

"The electric stuff of the culture"

Promethean shiny shield in White Noise and The Names

Television as "Waves and Radiations" in Americana and White Noise

　

2 Latent History and Techno-Progress

The Implication of Image Technologies in the Rise of Latent History

"Latent history" in Great Jones Street and Running Dog

From truth to technocultural possibilities within history

Historical Uncertainty and the Televisual Event in Libra

Kennedy’s filmed assassination: a pioneer of historical uncertainty

Oswald’s third line of history: the fall of historical causality

　

3 Reconceptualizing the Real

The Simultaneity of Recording and Receiving Events: Underworld and Falling Man

Visual insertion of the unusual in dailiness

The superreal and underreal aspects of the televisual event

The Reprogrammed Mind in Mao II, The Body Artist, and The Silence

The emergence of a third reality

Mediated gaze: "the virus of the future"

　

4 The Phenomenology of Technocultural Space

"Technocultural space" in End Zone

Perception at the margins of civilization

The ontological internalization of outer space

Tele-visuality in the desert

Encounters with Technocultural Parallax in Players

The complexity of postmodern architecture

Pammy’s phenomenological mode of being

　

5 Perception in the Informational Era

The "Dominant Metaphor" of Postmodern Technoculture

Information in DeLillo’s novels

The vitality of information: a reading of Cosmopolis

DeLillo’s Posthumans

Seeking the beyond: the other side of the screen

Transhumanism: the emancipation of consciousness in Point Omega and Zero K

Toward a virtual reality

Conclusion

Works Cited

Index

O autorze

Laila Sougri, PhD is a Moroccan translator, writer, and researcher. She has published numerous translations, short stories, and papers. Some of her current interests include methodologies of interdisciplinarity, American literature, memory studies, and speculative realism in literature and psychology.