The Sublime in Don DeLillo’s Mao II

Behrooz, Niloufar; Pirnajmuddin, Hossein

doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.50.137

ILSHS > ILSHS Volume 50 > The Sublime in Don DeLillo’s Mao II

< Back to Volume

The Sublime in Don DeLillo’s Mao II

Full Text PDF

Abstract:

The world that DeLillo’s characters live in is often portrayed with an inherent complexity beyond our comprehension, which ultimately leads to a quality of woe and wonder which is characteristic of the concept of the sublime. The inexpressibility of the events that emerge in DeLillo’s fiction has reintroduced into it what Lyotard calls “the unpresentable in presentation itself” (PC 81), or to put it in Jameson’s words, the “postmodern sublime” (38). The sublime, however, appears in DeLillo’s fiction in several forms and it is the aim of this study to examine these various forms of sublimity. It is attempted to read DeLillo’s Mao II in the light of theories of the sublime, drawing on figures like Burke, Kant, Lyotard, Jameson and Zizek. In DeLillo’s novel, it is no longer the divine and magnificent in nature that leads to a simultaneous fear and fascination in the viewers, but the power of technology and sublime violence among other things. The sublime in DeLillo takes many different names, ranging from the technological and violent to the hollow and nostalgic, but that does not undermine its essential effect of wonder; it just means that the sublime, like any other phenomenon, has adapted itself to the new conditions of representation. By drawing on the above mentioned theorists, therefore, the present paper attempts to trace the notion of sublimity in DeLillo's Mao II, to explore the transformation of the concept of the sublime under the current conditions of postmodernity as depicted in DeLillo’s fiction.

Info:

Periodical:

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences (Volume 50)

Pages:

137-145

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.50.137

Citation:

N. Behrooz and H. Pirnajmuddin, "The Sublime in Don DeLillo’s Mao II", International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Vol. 50, pp. 137-145, 2015

Online since:

March 2015

Authors:

Niloufar Behrooz, Hossein Pirnajmuddin

Keywords:

Don DeLillo, Postmodernism, Spirituality, Sublime, Technology, Violence

Export:

RIS, BibTeX, Text

Distribution:

Open Access

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

References:

Aaron, Daniel. How to read Don DeLillo. " Introducing Don Delillo., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, (2010).

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), (1983).

Bernstein, Stephen. Libra and the Historical Sublime., Postmodern Culture 4. 2. (1994).

Bloom, Harold. Ed. Don DeLillo's White Noise. Philadelphia: Chelseas House Publishers, (2003).

Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: the Possibility of Fiction. New York: Routledge, (2006).

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiryinto the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, (1990).

DeCurtis, Anthony. An Outsider in This Society: An Interview with Don DeLillo., The Fiction of Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Spec. issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (1990): 281-304.

DeLillo, Don. Mao II. New York: Penguin Books, (1991).

Duvall, John. N. Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2008).

Eco, Umberto. History of Beauty. Trans. Alastair McEwan. London: Secker and Warburg, (2004).

Frederick, Ayumi Clara Ohmoto. Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime (Review)., Comparative Literature Studies 46. 3 (2009): 549-552.

Jameson, Fredrick. Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, (1991).

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, (1952).

Knight, Peter. DeLillo, Postmodernism, Postmodernity., Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Ed. John. N. Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 27-40.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, (1984).

Maltby, Paul. The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo. " Don DeLillo, s White Noise. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 213-230.

Mandoki, Katya. Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Plan of Culture and Social Identities. Farnham: Ashgate, (2007).

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1964).

Mooney, Edward F. Meditations on Death and the Sublime: Henry Bugbee's in Demonstration of the Spirit., Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. 10. 1 (2009): 4262.

Munk, Linda. The Trivial Sublime: Theology and American Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, (1992).

Nadotti, Maria. An Interview with Don DeLillo., Salmagundi. 100 (1993): 86-97. Rpt. in DePietro. 109-18.

Nagano, Yohishiro. The Novelist in the Information Society: Don DeLillo's Mao II., Faculty bulletin, Sophia Junior College 27 (2007): 23-43.

Pepperell, Robert. An Information Sublime: Knowledge after The Postmodern Condition., Leonardo Reviews. 42. 5 (2009): 384.

Saltzman, Arthur M. The Figure in the Static: White Noise. " Don DeLillo, s White Noise. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 195-212.

Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London and New York: Routledge, (2006).

Tabbi, Joseph. Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. New York: Cornell University Press, (1996).

Ticinovic, Maria Anne. Sublimity and History in Don DeLillo's Underworld. B.A. The University of British Colombia, (1996).

Wawrzinek, Jennifer. Ambiguous Subjects Dissolution and Metamorphosis in the Postmodern Sublime. New York: Rodopi, (2008).

White, Luke. Sublime Resources: A Brief History of the Notion of the Sublime., July 2014. Retrieved from <http: /www. lukewhite. me. uk/sub_history. htm>.

Wieczorek, Marek. Introduction: The Ridiculous, Sublime Art of Slavoj Zizek. "The Ridiculous, Sublime Art of SlavojZizek: on David Lynch, s Lost Highway. University of Washington Press, (2000).

Zizek, Slavoj. The Ridiculous, Sublime Art of Slavoj Zizek: on David Lynch's Lost Highway. Ed. Marek Wieczorek. University of Washington Press, (2000).

Show More Hide

Cited By:

This article has no citations.