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The Strange Case of Don DeLillo, the Postmodernist Modernist
JOZOVÁ, Dominika
This thesis explores DeLillo's four novels - White Noise, Libra, Underworld and Falling Man with regards to the difficulties surrounding their placement within post/modernist poetics. The analysis is preceded by a theoretical introduction devoted to conceiving of DeLillo's work and its position on the borderline between modernist and postmodernist poetics. Furthermore, it attempts to define the basic concepts of modernism and postmodernism with special regards to the theory of such literary critics as Brian McHale and Linda Hutcheon, and such theoreticians as Jean-François Lyotard, Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard. In connection with these concepts the work deals with such topics as history, identity and medialisation in connection with the changing developments in post-war USA. The theoretical framework sketched in the theoretical introduction is drawn upon within the analysis of DeLillo's novels in the rest of the thesis, and applied to a critical examination of his difficult placement within the postmodern canon. Based on a close and critical reading of DeLillo's four novels, a detailed analysis of their (post)modernist features, the thesis documents the ambiguity facing every effort to co-opt DeLillo's fiction for either movement, displaying his work as a rather strange case of hybridity and non-binarity.
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