This book is the first to explore technoculture in all of Don DeLillo’s novels. From Americana (1971) to The Silence (2020), the American author anatomizes the constantly changing relationship between culture and technology in overt and layered aspects of the characters’ experiences. Through a tendency to discover and rediscover technocultural modes of appearance, DeLillo emphasizes settings wherein technological progress is implicated in cultural imperatives. This study brings forth representations of such implication/interaction through various themes, particularly perception, history, reality, space/architecture, information, and the posthuman. The chapters are based on a thematic structure that weaves DeLillo’s novels with the rich literary criticism produced on the author, and with the various theoretical frameworks of technoculture. This leads to the formulation and elaboration on numerous objects of research extracted from DeLillo's novels, namely: the theorization of DeLillo’s "radiance in dailiness," the investigation of various uses of technology as an extension, the role of image technologies in redefining history, the reconceptualization of the ethical and behavioral aspects of reality, the development of tele-visual and embodied perceptions in various technocultural spaces, and the involvement of information technologies in reconstructing the beliefs, behaviors, and activities of the posthuman. One of the main aims of the study is to show how DeLillo’s novels bring to light the constant transformation of technocultural everydayness. It is argued that though such transformation is confusing or resisted at times, it points to a transitional mode of being. This transitional state does not dehumanize DeLillo’s characters; it reveals their humanity in a continually changing world.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Don DeLillo’s Technoculture
The Interrelatedness of Culture and Technology
"Radiance in dailiness"
Prototypical extensions in Ratner’s Star and Zero K
Clearing technological determinism: "they shoot horses, don’t they?"
Breaching the Beyond: Attaining the Extraordinary through the Ordinary
"The electric stuff of the culture"
Promethean shiny shield in White Noise and The Names
Television as "Waves and Radiations" in Americana and White Noise
2 Latent History and Techno-Progress
The Implication of Image Technologies in the Rise of Latent History
"Latent history" in Great Jones Street and Running Dog
From truth to technocultural possibilities within history
Historical Uncertainty and the Televisual Event in Libra
Kennedy’s filmed assassination: a pioneer of historical uncertainty
Oswald’s third line of history: the fall of historical causality
3 Reconceptualizing the Real
The Simultaneity of Recording and Receiving Events: Underworld and Falling Man
Visual insertion of the unusual in dailiness
The superreal and underreal aspects of the televisual event
The Reprogrammed Mind in Mao II, The Body Artist, and The Silence
The emergence of a third reality
Mediated gaze: "the virus of the future"
4 The Phenomenology of Technocultural Space
"Technocultural space" in End Zone
Perception at the margins of civilization
The ontological internalization of outer space
Tele-visuality in the desert
Encounters with Technocultural Parallax in Players
The complexity of postmodern architecture
Pammy’s phenomenological mode of being
5 Perception in the Informational Era
The "Dominant Metaphor" of Postmodern Technoculture
Information in DeLillo’s novels
The vitality of information: a reading of Cosmopolis
DeLillo’s Posthumans
Seeking the beyond: the other side of the screen
Transhumanism: the emancipation of consciousness in Point Omega and Zero K
Toward a virtual reality
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
Biography
Laila Sougri, PhD is a Moroccan translator, writer, and researcher. She has published numerous translations, short stories, and papers. Some of her current interests include methodologies of interdisciplinarity, American literature, memory studies, and speculative realism in literature and psychology.
