Don DeLillo, White Noise Lecture II Ramon Saldivar Stanford University

“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.” 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

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 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

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 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

Postmodern Sunsets WN 216 “Why try to describe it?” “Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery.” “Why try to describe it?” 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

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.” 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

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? 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

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” 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

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 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

Romantic Sublime 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

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 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

Boticelli, Birth of Venus 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

Andy Warhol Birth of Venus (after Boticelli) 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

Modern Postmodern Irony Form (closed) Purpose Design Hierarchy Creation Synthesis Centering Selection Genital Transcendence Pastiche Antiform (open) Play Chance Anarchy Deconstruction Antithesis Dispersal Combination Androgynous Immanence 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

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 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise

Postmodern 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." 11/14/2018 DeLillo White Noise