1. Don DeLillo, White Noise Lecture II
Ramon Saldivar
Stanford University

2. “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.”
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DeLillo White Noise

3. 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
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DeLillo White Noise

4. Postmodern EpiphaniesWN
“a moment of splendid transcendence”
Manifestation of transcendence in shopping
Sublime boundary between the classical, the modern, and the postmodern
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DeLillo White Noise

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

6. 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.”
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7. 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?
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DeLillo White Noise

8. 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”
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DeLillo White Noise

9. 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
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DeLillo White Noise

10. Romantic Sublime
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11. 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
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12. Boticelli, Birth of Venus
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13. Andy Warhol Birth of Venus (after Boticelli)
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14. 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
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DeLillo White Noise

15. 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
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DeLillo White Noise

16. 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."
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DeLillo White Noise