Cette thèse se propose d’interroger la notion d’événement comme motif organisateur de la fiction de Don DeLillo. En effet, l’assassinat du président J. F. Kennedy et les attentats du 11 septembre sont des phénomènes qui résistent infatigablement au « réel », et à toute traçabilité ontologique ou phénoménologique. À ce titre, ils excèdent la pensée et exigent une réponse nécessaire de l’auteur et de son écriture face à leur irruption. Ils représentent une incursion excessive dans le « réel » et se manifestent sous la forme du surplus. Mais l’événement n’est pas simplement un surplus de réalité, il est aussi un surplus de sens, entendu comme inadéquation du signe à ce qu’il désigne. Il s’agira de montrer dans un premier temps que l’événement se montre excessivement dans le retrait de sa monstration. Nous aborderons cette dialectique du voilement et du dévoilement à travers le prisme de l’Histoire en tenant compte de sa dimension non seulement phénoménologique et traumatique mais également à partir de la notion d’altérité que l’événement sous-tend. Ce paradoxe une fois révélé, nous nous pencherons sur la question du temps car l’événement remet en question l’origine qui le fait advenir et ne prend sens seulement que lorsqu’il est advenu. Il dérègle de facto la temporalité qui avait cours. Il sera alors question de mettre en lumière le dérèglement des instances du temps « classique » : passé, présent et futur. Nous nous focaliserons sur la question du ressassement en nous intéressant, par ailleurs, à la manière par laquelle les concepts de temps, d’événement et d’altérité fonctionnent de conserve. Enfin, nous aborderons l’événement en tant qu’événement-récit en accentuant notre étude sur le terrorisme et la terreur, notions indissociables de la fiction delillienne, en ce qu’ils fournissent des modèles de totalité et de totalisation que l’écriture de l’événement s’emploie — éthiquement — à défaire. En ce sens, l’événement prendra la forme d’un contre-événement. Il s’agira par conséquent de décrypter les événements de texte que DeLillo propose comme moyen de résistance à toute totalisation. Enfin, nous considèrerons certains personnages comme des événements dans la mesure où ils réassertent le caractère événemential de l’individu. / This dissertation wishes to reflect upon the notion of event as an organizing principle in Don DeLillo’s fiction. The assassination of J. F. Kennedy and 9/11 are events that unflinchingly resist the real, or any kind of ontological and phenomenological traceability. They exceed understanding and demand a necessary response from the author and his writing. They represent the intrusion of an excessive reality within “the real” and manifest themselves in the guise of a surplus. But the event is not just a surplus of reality, it is also a surplus of meaning as it posits the inadequacy of the sign and its referent. We will first show how the event shows itself in the very way it shuns its own exposure. This dialectics of veiling and unveiling will be scrutinized through the lenses of History considered both in its phenomenological and traumatic dimensions but also as far as it relates to alterity or otherness. Once the paradox is revealed, we will consider the issue of time for the event defies the origin that makes it happen and makes sense only after it has happened. It thus shatters the temporal continuum commonly understood as past, present and future. We will then focus on the issue of a-temporality and show how time, event and alterity are inextricably linked together. We will finally look at the event understood this time as narrative by focusing our attention upon terror and terrorism as they provide models of totality the writing of the event attempts — ethically — at breaching and undoing. In this sense, the event wille be considered as a counter-event. It will be worth deciphering the textual events DeLillo proposes as a means of resisting totalization. We will also apprehend some key characters as events in their own rights as they reassert the evential dimension of the subject.

Uppsatsens syfte är att studera porträtteringen av nationell identitet i Don DeLillos Falling Man och Amy Waldmans The Submission i förhållande till efterverkningarna av 9/11. Studien utgörs av undersökande och jämförande analyser av romanerna utifrån ett litteratursociologiskt samt postkolonialt perspektiv med fokus på nationalism, religion och commemoration.   Studien har presenterat hur amerikansk identitet har ifrågasatts och problematiserats i romanerna Falling Man och The Submission, och visat hur religion, commemoration och nationalism hänger samman med den amerikanska identiteten. En identitet som visat sig föränderlig och problematisk i efterverkningarna av 9/11. Studien har också kunnat visa att böckerna inte ämnar att lyfta fram en gestaltning av identitet som något allenarådande eller fast, utan att de istället visar hur identitet ständigt förändras och skiljer sig från karaktär till karaktär, genom problematiserandet kring tillhörighet, trygghet och trauma.

This dissertation examines a twentieth-century lineage of writers and poets concerned with signatory inscription. By this, I mean the writing, tracing, branding, embossing, tattooing, or engraving of the name of a person or place onto various kinds of surfaces, as well as other forms of marking that approximate autography. My contention is that James Joyce's novels demonstrate an explicit, underexplored concern with signature and the different imaginary investments (erotic, legal, preservative) that accompany its presence in the world. In Joyce's wake, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, and Don DeLillo all produce texts that both engage with Joyce's novels and think carefully about the potential of the signature as a material object. My first chapter, 'James Joyce's Signatures', explores how nineteenth-century developments in graphology and forensic identification inherit ideas from the medicinal doctrine of signatures. I argue that this expanded sense of signature offers a unique perspective on Joyce's taxonomic representation, which questions the boundaries between a body of text and (non)human bodies. The presence of legal trials in Ulysses adds a forensic element to Joyce's signatory imagination. This element is taken to its logical extreme in 'Nausicaa', where scents, sounds, and impressions become bodily, as opposed to alphabetical, signatures - produced by humans, waves, and stones. The second chapter, 'Samuel Beckett and the Endurance of Names', continues this line of argument, showing how Beckett inherits Joyce's interest in autographic inscription, but employs it for different ends. While the epitaphic tradition relies upon hard materials such as stone and metal to preserve lettering, Beckett's interest in excrement ('First Love') and mud (How It Is) remaps inscription onto immanence. Rather than seeking immortality through lithic preservation, Beckett's characters yearn to 'return to the mineral state', to have their bodies subsumed and dispersed throughout a greater container. The third chapter, 'Seamus Heaney and the Phonetics of Place', turns from the signature of persons to the signature of places, from prose to poetry. Explicitly glossing poems like 'Anahorish', 'Toome', and 'Broagh' as inspired by Stephen Dedalus, Heaney performs a critical repatriation of Joyce's work. Joyce uses fictional, motivated relations between names and referents to construct a linguistic correlative for Stephen's youthful naivety - a technique that personalises his lexicon, privileging Stephen's own associations over those of nationality, language, or religion. Heaney, on the other hand, politicises this process, utilising phonetic association to forge imaginary correspondences between Irish place-names and the people and places they denote. The final chapter, 'Don DeLillo, Encryption, and Writing Technologies', examines the novels of Don DeLillo and his interest in signatory technologies. Drawing upon archival research conducted on the manuscripts of Americana, Ratner's Star and The Names, I show that Joyce influenced the composition of these texts to a greater extent than previously thought. In particular, DeLillo uses Joyce to think through the technological dimensions of writing, comparing older methods of inscription like boustrophedon to modern communication technologies via Ulysses.

This thesis aims to explore how the idea of American Dream is presented in White Noise, how the Dream is represented as ¡§American magic,¡¨ and how eventually it turns into ¡§American dread,¡¨ the ultimate American nightmare. In Chapter One, I provide a brief historical survey on the concept of the American Dream, the idea that mainly shaped the American nation in history. I turn to Jim Cullen¡¦s The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation and Andrew Delbanco¡¦s The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope to explore how the idea of the American Dream changes through the course of American history as well as construct a historical background of the American Dream. Chapter Two explores how the American Dream in White Noise is exposed and transformed into what DeLillo terms in the novel as the ¡§American magic¡¨ via the novel¡¦s extreme emphasis on the issue of mass media, the operation of simulated magic. First, I briefly analyze the American Dream succeeded in White Noise based on my survey of the American Dream in the previous chapter. Reading DeLillo¡¦s ¡§American magic¡¨ as the simulated dream in White Noise in light of Baudrillard¡¦s theory of simulacra and simulation, I argue that White Noise is in fact a novel based on the critique of the American Dream due to the falsehood of the protagonists¡¦ American Dream televised through media and consumer culture. In Chapter Three, by recalling the novel¡¦s emphasis on the protagonists¡¦ fear of death, I aim to examine the true reason for such fatal fear. While many may read White Noise simply as a postmodern representation of man¡¦s uncontrollable natural fear of death, I examine the connection of this major theme of fear towards death to DeLillo¡¦s American magic and point out the possibility of American magic acting both as a cause and reinforcement of this fear as well as relating it to the larger issue of DeLillo¡¦s ¡§American dread¡¨ ¡Xa portrayal of the American Dream and magic brought to its extremity and stirred towards a possible apocalyptic end.

Criticism surrounding the children of the Gladney family in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise remains a contested issue. I argue the children and their social environment reflect Lee Edelman’s analysis of the Child figure and its bolstering of reproductive futurism. The Child figure upholds a heteronormative social order that precludes equal rights and social viability for non-normative family structures and those opposed to an inherently conservative ideology. I find the continually evolving family structure elicits new dynamics among its members, offering greater social independence for all, which institutes a stronger familial bond and ensures a greater chance for its vitality. The Gladney family share such a dynamic; this is observed through the specific roles its members perform and the relations among them. Furthermore, I contend the Gladney family represent a model for maintaining group vitality, which is first required for organized political action against our inequitable social order.

The following thesis represents an attempt to account for the novelist Don DeLillo's last three novels (Underworld (1999), The Body Artist (2001), and Cosmopolis (2003)) through the examination of what I conceive as DeLillo's philosophy of language. It is my assertion that the crucial and articulating aspect of DeLillo's philosophy of language is his investment in, and investigation of, irony. As I argue, DeLillo's novels presume a certain conjugation of what I refer to as the work of irony (the seemingly impossible work of tendering both the allegorical imperative of naming and the ironic imperative of Otherness) with the work of art. In other words, DeLillo's theory of language reveals his theory of art and, thus, his own theory of writing. This aesthetic philosophy becomes the critical tool with which DeLillo evaluates the various symbolic economies of a culture and its individuals caught within late capitalism. The impossibility of defining irony becomes, for DeLillo, a metaphor by which to understand language itself as what I refer to as a fallen and tender economy, constituted by an Otherness, which language can only tender. In his novels, DeLillo, I argue, suggests that language and subjectivity ought to be conceived of as forms of a faith in an Otherness, impossible to represent as such, to which all speech, violence, art, commodity and reproduction are indebted, and which we may mourn and represent - as we must - more or less faithfully, more or less blindly, and, by virtue of irony, more or less tenderly. The possibilities of faith and the ethical in art and representation, thus, for DeLillo, arise through an attention to an Otherness that can only be tendered through the very tenderness (fallenness, profanity, weakness) of allegory and language. To understand this is to understand the role of irony in DeLillo's philosophy, and also to understand DeLillo's profound commitment to language, his renovation of allegory through its mortification by irony and, thus, its remembering and mourning of Otherness. In this regard, DeLillo shares much with the melancholia of deconstruction as evinced within the language philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, in particular, Derrida's economic consideration, differance, and his notion of the work of mourning, both of which, I argue, offer the reader of DeLillo's texts ways of tendering the work of irony.

Since the end of World War II, the possibility of fascism and totalitarianism as a global threat continues to proliferate in American art and literature to the point that many individuals paradoxically desire the very things that seek to control them. Postmodern literature often portrays fascism and totalitarianism as it exists under contemporary capitalist systems as a multiplicity of discreet machines operating within objects of desire. These objects are complicated by the 24-hour news cycle and the popularity of solitary, on-demand entertainment that in turn mediates the desires and fears of a population through strict control of information. This thesis examines works by George Saunders, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace through a post-structural lens and seeks to explore the moments in these novels where desire and fascism intersect to create an endless, self-replicating form of control that is often too discreet to notice.

No description available.

Ce mémoire s’intéresse à la présence des œuvres d’art fictives dans le roman contemporain. Leur description précise remet en question les codes de la représentation et soumet le lecteur à une autre forme d’expérience face à l’œuvre d’art. C’est à travers les concepts d’immersion, d’intermédialité et d’interaction que la fiction de l’œuvre d’art dans le texte sera ici abordée à travers trois différents romans, soit The Body Artist de Don DeLillo, La Carte et le territoire de Michel Houellebecq et Œuvres d’Édouard Levé. La transformation de l’expérience de lecture suggère un renouvellement de l’esthétique littéraire, accentuant l’importance de la participation du lecteur dans la démarche créatrice, et ouvrant les possibilités de la transmission de l’art contemporain. Les dispositifs propres au récit sont mis de l’avant pour intégrer le médium visuel, et ainsi questionner le rapport à l’attribution du sens de l’œuvre d’art, à son interprétation et à sa perception. Le présent mémoire tentera de proposer des possibilités pour l’art contemporain de se manifester à l’extérieur des institutions muséales traditionnelles, permettant ainsi de considérer l’immersion littéraire comme étant non seulement une expérience de lecture, mais aussi une approche face à l’art visuel. / This thesis focuses on the presence of fictional works of art in the contemporary novel. Through their precise descriptions, the fictional works of art challenge the codes of representation and transform the reader’s experience in front of the artwork. It is through the concepts of immersion, intermediality and interaction that the fictional nature of the works of art in the text will be addressed here through three different novels which are The Body Artist by Don DeLillo, La carte et le territoire by Michel Houellebecq and Oeuvres by Édouard Levé. The transformation of the reading experience suggests a renewal of literary aesthetics, showing the importance of the reader’s participation in the artistic process and creating new opening possibilities for the transmission of contemporary art. Specific narrative devices are put forward to integrate the visual medium and to questions the meaning of the work of art, its interpretation and perception. This thesis attempts to provide opportunities for contemporary art to manifest itself outside the traditional museum institutions, thus considering the literary immersion not only as a reading experience, but also as an approach to experience visual art .

No description available.