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BRIEF DESCRIPTION
The Radiance of Dailiness: Don DeLillo and the Everyday is about Don
DeLillo and things—real world, physical, everyday things. My project
approaches DeLillo as a cultural archeologist who uses ordinary objects
in his novels to understand life in contemporary America. Examining
the way common, household things—a Coca-Cola bottle, a pair of
shoes, kitchen trash—circulate through DeLillo’s fourteen novels, I
argue that DeLillo imagines that everyday life is populated by things as
much as by people. Moreover, DeLillo reveals that the objects we
might otherwise take to be mundane and apolitical are in fact deeply
connected to larger social and historical forces.
FULL DESCRIPTION
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physical properties of an object allow. These affordances shape
DeLillo’s characters, and in some cases, entire plot trajectories, which
suggests that for DeLillo the bric-a-brac in our houses, apartments,
offices, and stores is not merely background clutter—white noise, so to
speak—but is in fact ecological, a formative and transformative aspect
of our physical environment.
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DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) that “everyday things represent the most
overlooked forms of knowledge.” Benjamin taps into these forms of
overlooked knowledge, often by examining what he calls a “dialectical
image,” a startling juxtaposition of two opposing elements, bound
together in a way that disrupts a typical understanding of either of the
elements. DeLillo too, I argue, exposes everyday life through dialectical
images—say, a Molotov cocktail in a Coca-Cola bottle—and indeed, this
is DeLillo’s primary strategy for exploring, to quote from Father Paulus
again, “the depth and reach of the commonplace.”
CHAPTER OUTLINE
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histories—those books that document the history of goods like
coffee or chocolate—Americans are entranced by the possibility
of seeing what is normally kept hidden from us. I am skeptical
about the pedagogical mission of such texts, and I argue that
DeLillo offers an alternative way to locate the unexpected in the
commonplace. I frame my overarching argument with a striking
but neglected passage from White Noise (1985), in which Jack
Gladney and the neurochemist Winnie Richards discuss the
engineering behind a mysterious pill Jack has found. This scene,
which couples Gladney’s awe of advanced technology with
Richard’s understanding of basic bodily functions, is an
archetypal moment for DeLillo, in which he imposes—critically
and sardonically—a forensic vision upon an ordinary object,
exposing its secret life.
Building on the work in the first chapter, I look more closely here
at how DeLillo imagines one of the most basic aspects of daily
life: the food we eat and the drinks we drink. Not surprisingly,
food does not function for DeLillo as a source of nourishment or
as the focus of a communal experience. In texts such as Players
(1977), The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), The Body Artist
(2001), and Falling Man (2007), dining—even dining together—is
an isolating experience, and food itself is sterile and lifeless, a
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metaphor for DeLillo’s own characters. Nonetheless, DeLillo
suggests that we continue to look to food and dining as a means
toward recapturing the sacred nature of the agape.
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understanding of textuality; rather, broken signification in
DeLillo’s world is a result of the affordances of textual material—
paper, books, playing cards, money—and a testament to the way
that the physical world disrupts the process of signification.
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venues, including the definitive Don DeLillo site, Don DeLillo’s America
<http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html>
What sets my project apart from these works is evident from the titles
alone. Consider the nouns in these titles: Fiction, Language, Grief,
Nothing, Belief, The Unconscious. As I discussed above, the current
crop of criticism largely tackles the metaphysical side of DeLillo, while
my approach is grounded in the concrete, the real, the everyday
material world.
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