Don DeLillo, White Noise Lecture II

1. Don DeLillo,White NoiseLecture II Ramon Saldivar Stanford University

2. “Everything is concealed in symbolism.” Murray Jay Suskind • WN 37 • Supermarket as revelation • WN 38 • Supermarket as renewal • WN 34 “Pockets of rapport” • “magic act . . . of adults and children, sharing unaccountable things.” DeLillo White Noise

3. Epiphanies Classical and Modern • Epiphany • In Hellenistic times an epiphany (from the Greek epiphania, "manifestation"), was an appearance of divine power in a person or event • The New Testament uses the word to denote the final appearing of Christ at the end of time; but in 2 Timothy 1:10 it refers to his coming as Saviour on earth. • James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 171 • Transformation of the material world by the imagination DeLillo White Noise

4. Postmodern Epiphanies • WN 148-49 • “a moment of splendid transcendence” • Manifestation of transcendence in shopping • Sublime boundary between the classical, the modern, and the postmodern DeLillo White Noise

5. Postmodern Sunsets • WN 216 • “Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery.” • “Why try to describe it?” DeLillo White Noise

6. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”(1863) • Modernity defined: • “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; • “It is the one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable.” DeLillo White Noise

7. The End of Modernity and the Post-modern Condition • WN 61 • “modern sunset” • What constitutes the “ominous” of this sunset? • What would the end of modernity mean? DeLillo White Noise

8. Post-industrial Aesthetics • WN 162 • “the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful” • Conjunction of • The beautiful and the toxic: • “ruddled visionary skyscapes” and • “effluents, pollutants, contaminants, and deliriants” DeLillo White Noise

9. Romantic Sublime • Shelley, Wordsworth • Nature’s awesome beauty • Wonder and fear • Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement • Sublime • The unspeakable power of nature • Inspires awe, terror, dread • The limits of the imagination DeLillo White Noise

10. Romantic Sublime DeLillo White Noise

11. Kant, On the Sublime • “Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightening flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river -- these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. . . We call these object sublime because they raise the energies of the soul above accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance . . . which gives courage to measure ourselves against the almightiness of nature.” • Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, B. XXVIII DeLillo White Noise

12. Boticelli, Birth of Venus DeLillo White Noise

13. Andy WarholBirth of Venus (after Boticelli) DeLillo White Noise

14. Irony Form (closed) Purpose Design Hierarchy Creation Synthesis Centering Selection Genital Transcendence Pastiche Antiform (open) Play Chance Anarchy Deconstruction Antithesis Dispersal Combination Androgynous Immanence Modern Postmodern DeLillo White Noise

15. Postmodern Sublime • A realm full of “content, feeling, an exalted narrative life” WN 308-9 • What is the cause of this Postmodern Sublime? • NOT nihilism • The necessity of belief DeLillo White Noise

16. Postmodern Technology • Technology • Commodification of dreams, desires, and the unconscious • "Technology is our fate, our truth," the novelist Don DeLillo writes in the December 2001 issue of Harper's magazine. "We don't have to depend on God or the prophets or other astonishments. The miracle is what we ourselves produce." DeLillo White Noise