This study discusses works by Martin Amis and Don DeLillo in the context of several
key scientific and technological transformations that occur in the aftermath of the Second
World War.
I begin by revisiting one of the most-discussed aspects of DeLillo's work: the currents conspiracy and paranoia that recur in his novels and, he claims, pervade the wider
culture. By demonstrating how paranoid narratives strive to accommodate contemporary
technologies, I create a context in which the paranoia addressed in works such as Libra
and Underworld becomes intelligible as a response to the specific technological character
of surveilance and control in the post-War period.
The sciences of information and cybernetics also cohere in the years folowing the War,
and the second chapter explores the creative tension between metaphors of entropy and
information in Amis's fiction as wel as DeLillo's.
The third chapter focuses on television as a constitutive element of postmodernity, and
traces how DeLillo and Amis adopt narrative strategies that enable them to represent
subjects who have grown accustomed to living within an environment mediated, to an
unprecedented degree, by visual imagery supplied by or formatted for television.
Another product of postmodern technology, commercial air travel reconfigures
relationships to place and to time for inhabitants of industrialized countries. Both the
liberating and limiting consequences of living in the latter half of the century of flight are
addressed in the fourth chapter.
The final chapter offers an assessment of the role contemporary media and technology
play in establishing the characteristics associated with postmodernity, and concludes with
a brief discussion of the role the internet might play within the context of the specific
technologies discussed in the body of the thesis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/13819 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Thomson, D. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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