Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

Drawing from a variety of multimedia and archival materials, my dissertation involves a three-figure examination of Bob Dylan, T.S. Eliot, and Don DeLillo. These three figures are linked, (as some other critics have noted) through scattered intertextual allusions. But I argue that a more telling correlation exists in the manner in which all three managed to rise to the apex of their respective fields. I examine this phenomenon and in so doing, my project seeks out a composite theoretical model, better suited to explain the multiform artistry of Dylan and to account for the related transformative cultural navigation of Eliot and DeLillo at key points their careers. My dissertation sheds light on these authors drawing on Bourdieu’s model of “the field of cultural production” and Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation:” how print, photography film, and other media appropriate, influence, and reconstitute each other. I reconfigure their concept to focus on individual agency and situate these three as consummate remediators of their own and each other’s work, their individual legacies, and ultimately the very “field of cultural production” itself. This reading recasts our understanding of each author: I position Dylan as a major contemporary literary figure; Eliot as a consummate public performer and recording artist; and DeLillo as a visionary cultural remixer. This analysis provides fresh perspectives on the idea of authorship, canonicity and textuality, as it suggests that a vigorous literary analysis requires us to move beyond a specific medium associated with an author toward a dynamic field of multimodal intertextuality. Literary research and pedagogy in the media-saturated 21st century classroom demand a canon unbound. Such a canon, I argue, should include figures like Dylan, as it should also provoke a fuller, more vital engagement with “the literary tradition” within which we place figures like Eliot and DeLillo. My work, situated at the crossroads between American literature, cultural studies, and the emerging field of the digital humanities, thus produces a more nuanced understanding of the authors in question, the canonical heritage to which they contribute, and the scholarly methods by which we appraise and teach their works. / text

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Rhetorics of identification traditionally address two questions: how does rhetoric work, who or what is involved in rhetorical relations, and how do these relations unfold and proceed, and how can and should we conduct ourselves in light of this state of things, what modes of engagement and response do we have available? Rhetoricians have drawn substantially on Kenneth Burke’s work on symbolic action in answering these questions, but this emphasis on the symbolic does not exhaust the range and nature of rhetorical relations, and other modes of relationality thus warrant our attention. My work aims to consider how our understanding of identification shifts when we move beyond the symbolic frame, when we attend to rhetorical relations without grounding our inquiry in considerations of representation, interpretation, understanding, dialectics, and epistemology. Drawing on conversations in nonrational rhetorics, object-oriented ontology, postmodernism and postmodern literature, digital rhetorics, writing studies, and video game studies, I attend to the material, affective, and singular nature of rhetorical relations. I also consider the modes of engagement this understanding of identification makes available with reference to writing pedagogy and the work of authors Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. / text

"Longer works of fiction," a character in William Gaddis's JR complains of the current literary scene, are now "dismissed as classics and remain . . . largely unread due to the effort involved in reading and turning any more than two hundred pages" (527). This study argues that despite most literary critics constructing American postmodernism as a movement that privileges short works, in contrast to the encyclopedic masterworks of modernism, there are in fact a large number of artistically sophisticated contemporary novels of encyclopedic scope that demonstrate often ignored lines of continuity from works like James Joyce's Ulysses. In arguing this, I attempt not just to draw attention to a neglected strain in contemporary American fiction, but also to provide a more accurate context in which those few recent encyclopedic novels that have assumed centrality, like Gravity's Rainbow, might be evaluated. In doing so, this thesis also seeks to demonstrate the pivotal position of William Gaddis who, despite publishing four impressive novels that engage with the legacy of modernism and pre-empt elements of postmodernism, has been excluded from most studies dealing with the transition between the two movements. Through detailed readings of four encyclopedic novels - Gaddis's The Recognitions, Don DeLillo's Underworld, Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest - I show Gaddis's continuation of encyclopedic modernism, the importance of his example to later writers, and the continuing vitality of the encyclopedic novel beyond the defined limits of modernism. However, as these novels try to encompass the full circle of knowledge, in order to do justice to their diverse learning I have adopted a different approach in each chapter. Very broadly, they attempt to encircle art, psychology, science, and literature, which, taken together, attempt to synthesise a defence of the contemporary encyclopedic novel. While minimalist writers from Raymond Carver to Ann Beattie have affirmed that less is more, this thesis argues that, in some cases, more really is more.

The relation between sociology and literature opens up a broad field for discussion because of their closeness. The diploma thesis pursues a rather uncommon approach to literature that searches for manifestations of sociological thought in literature in order to use them within contexts of thematically similar sociological theories. A considerable attention is paid to definition of this approach, especially in relation to standard methods of sociology of literature, and to subsequent formulation of its methodological starting-points. Sociological reading as introduced in the text interprets a literary work in the perspective of selected sociological theories to which the interpretation is reversely related in the following step. In the thesis the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo, a classical work of American postmodern fiction, is taken as an object of such interpretation. The theme of effects of the mass media in contemporary society marked out widely in the beginning is specified by selected theories of Jean Baudrillard and Niklas Luhmann. In the case of Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality and simulation, changes in relation between reality and representation, respectively disappearance of their traditional opposition, are concerned. Luhmann's social systems theory is used to explore the...

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Esta dissertação investiga os modos de representação da realidade no romance Homem em queda, do norte-americano Don DeLillo. O método utilizado é a análise interpretativa de trechos chaves do romance que possam representar a arquitetura de toda a narrativa, ao modo de Erich Auerbach. Escritos do teórico Fredric Jameson acerca do inconsciente político e da questão temporal na pós-modernidade se somam a teorias de Karl Marx (alienação) e Guy Debord (sociedade do espetáculo) para auxiliar a leitura sócio-histórica do romance. / This master\'s thesis investigates the representation of reality in the novel Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The method is the interpretative analysis of key excerpts of the novel which may represent the whole architecture of the narrative, following the steps of Erich Auerbach. Writings by Fredric Jameson about the political unconscious and temporality in postmodernity as the theories of Karl Marx (alienation) and Guy Debord (society of the spectacle) helped us leading a socio-historical reading of the novel.

Esta dissertação investiga os modos de representação da realidade no romance Homem em queda, do norte-americano Don DeLillo. O método utilizado é a análise interpretativa de trechos chaves do romance que possam representar a arquitetura de toda a narrativa, ao modo de Erich Auerbach. Escritos do teórico Fredric Jameson acerca do inconsciente político e da questão temporal na pós-modernidade se somam a teorias de Karl Marx (alienação) e Guy Debord (sociedade do espetáculo) para auxiliar a leitura sócio-histórica do romance. / This master\'s thesis investigates the representation of reality in the novel Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The method is the interpretative analysis of key excerpts of the novel which may represent the whole architecture of the narrative, following the steps of Erich Auerbach. Writings by Fredric Jameson about the political unconscious and temporality in postmodernity as the theories of Karl Marx (alienation) and Guy Debord (society of the spectacle) helped us leading a socio-historical reading of the novel.