Browsing by Subject "Postmodernism (Literature)"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Horror of Intimacy/Intimacy of Horror - William Gaddis, The Recognitions 725/919 Counterfeit, Simulation, and the Uncanny in William Gaddis' The Recognitions
    (2013) Richardson, David; Stadler, Gustavus
    William Gaddis’ 1955 novel The Recognitions concerns a young painter, Wyatt Gwyon, and his involvement in a forgery ring in New York City. The characters of Gaddis’ New York, alongside Wyatt’s forged artworks, are observed to be bound to a perpetual cycle of misrecognition; they miss each other and are missed in return; thus the universe of The Recognitions, alongside Gaddis' text, is plagued by a persistent but untraceable sense of loss and anxiety. This untraceable sense of loss is underscored and multiplied by the motif of the counterfeit. Through the work of counterfeiting, Gaddis brokers a reality wherein recognition becomes a work of violence that serves to render the strange familiar, and the familiar, infinitely strange. Insofar as the familiar is made foreign and vice versa, the universe of the novel becomes a site of Freudian uncanny encounters with an ungraspable past that at once lords over and abandons the reality of Gaddis' characters, initiating a palindromic oscillation between the "horror of intimacy" (Gaddis 725) and the "intimacy of horror" (Gaddis 919). Wyatt’s attempts to come to terms with this shifting reality of misrecognition, displacement, and loss and his implication in its foundational work results in the corruption of his identity and of Gaddis’ text at large. Through the narrative and textual incorporation of simulation, Gaddis’ novel prefigures many of the concerns of postmodern literature, namely the death of the author, the infinite shift of the meaning of the text, and the subsequent birth of the reader. These concerns engender a new literature.
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    Spirtuality and Simulcra: Understanding the Mundane and Metaphysical in Don DeLillo's White Noise
    (2017) Aaronson, Anna; Stadler, Gustavus
    This essay presents an analysis of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise that investigates the metaphysical and psychological ramifications of information saturation within the context of late capitalism. Through an exploration of Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller, and inquiry into the historicity of communication and the flow of ideas in an informationalized society, this argument systematically problematizes rigidly postmodern, reductionist readings of DeLillo’s novel. In lieu of resignation to the pastiche and irony characteristic of some other postmodern works of literature, DeLillo infuses his text with mysticism, philosophical meditations, and poignant emotional sincerity. The recuperation and revitalization of pre-modern modes of storytelling in a world defined by commodification and consumerism discloses a metaphysical, spiritual, and even sublime dimension of the postmodern condition; this dimension arguably drives much of the plot and character development within White Noise. Through DeLillo’s interpolation of pre-modern spirituality, one can glean a multifaceted understanding of the protagonist-narrator Jack Gladney’s simultaneous yearning for transcendence and his deep anxieties surrounding his imminent death. Jack consequently manufactures a type of public identity, “J.A.K. Gladney,” esteemed professor of Hitler studies, instrumentalizing Hitler’s historical intensity and power to mitigate and repress his own death-fear. Jack, in his recognition of the artifice of his professorial veneer, suffers existential anxieties, and is unable to reconcile the disparate components of his fragmented subjectivity. This essay is a celebration of DeLillo’s unique narrative style--his creative, idiosyncratic use of different rhetorical modes and his defamiliarization and mystification of the mundane interactions and observations of daily life. Ultimately, this essay unpacks the profound spirituality and emotion underlying the dissemination of information.