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In the "enigma" I created for you, you read many texts by Don DeLillo, such as "White noise" and "The Falling Man". You have also read about "Underworld".  

 

You have learned about artists who influenced DeLillo, such as Jean-Luc Godard (the french movie director) and Gerhard Richter's paintings on the terrorist group Baader-Meinhof (RAF), based on newspaper photographs. 

 

Other important references to his books:

 

- The front page of The New York Times (Oct. 4, 1951);

- A photograph in 9-11, the man with a briefcase;

- A song from Godard's soundtrack (movie: 2 or 3 things I know about her): The suburbs, by Arcade Fire. 

 

In the extra videos I linked for you, in the "Performance" topic, there are discussions about violation of human rights, including Don DeLillo's reading on the CIA, Naomi Klein's reading on "The Shock Doctrine" and Jean-Luc Godard's reading on Hannah Arendt. 

 

 

Below, you'll find DeLillo's bibliography:

 

Main writings:

 

Americana. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Rev. Ed. New York: Penguin, 1989.

End Zone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Paper: New York: Penguin, 1986.

Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Paper: New York: Vintage, 1989.

Ratner's Star. New York: Knopf, 1976.

Players. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Running Dog. New York: Knopf, 1978.

The Names. New York: Knopf, 1982.

White Noise. New York: Viking, 1985. Scholarly Ed. Text and Criticism (Viking Critical Library), Edited by Mark Osteen. Viking, 1998. Reprint Ed. Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century. Penguin, 1999. Note: this 1999 Penguin reprint has different pagination than the other editions (1986 Penguin paperback, and Viking Critical edition both follow the original hardcover pagination).

Libra. New York: Viking, 1988.

Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.

Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.

The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003.

Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007.

Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010.

The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories. New York: Scribner, 2011.

Pseudonymous Novel [co-written with Sue Buck; published under the name Cleo Birdwell]:

Amazons. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980.

 

SCREENPLAY:

Game 6. Dir. Michael Hoffman. Perf. Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Griffin Dunne, Bebe Neuwirth, Catherine O'Hara, Tom Aldredge, Ari Graynor, Roger Rees. Serenade Films/Shadowcatcher Entertainment, 2005. Premiered at Sundance Film Festival, January 2005.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOME UNCOLLECTED SHORT FICTION TEXTS:

"Human Moments in World War III." Esquire July 1983: 118-26. Rpt. in Great Esquire Fiction: The Finest Stories from the First Fifty Years.

"The Runner." Harper's Sept. 1988: 61-63.

"Baader-Meinhof." New Yorker 1 April 2002: 78-82.

"Midnight in Dostoevsky." The New Yorker 30 Nov. 2009: 68-77. <http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/11/30/091130fi_fiction_delillo>.

"Sputnik." The New Yorker 8 Sept. 1997: 76-79. Compare Underworld, 513-21.

"The Border of Fallen Bodies." Esquire April 2003: 124-27. Compare Cosmopolis, 170-78.

"Still Life." The New Yorker 9 Apr. 2007: 62-69. <http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/04/09/070409fi_fiction_delillo>. FromFalling Man.

 

 

FILM:

Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image and the Gun. BBC. Broadcast 27 Sept. 1991. Dir: Kim Evans.

 

Don DeLillo: The Word, The Image, and The Gun

On September 27, 1991 BBC 1 broadcast a film on Don DeLillo, titled "Don DeLillo: The Word, The Image, and The Gun" which was directed by Kim Evans. Thanks to a friend of the page I have an audio tape of the film, and have transcribed a bit of it.

The film is introduced as follows:

 

Don DeLillo writes dangerous fiction.

He's been called America's leading contemporary novelist, and his ten novels come directly out of the flow of recent history. The Kennedy assassination, toxic fallout, acts of terrorism; these are all part of the running picture of news against which his books are set.

This film was developed in close collaboration with DeLillo. He wanted to use the documentary form to explore the relationships between gunmen and the novelist, words and images, the power of news and the obsession with apocalypse. In doing so he asks, what effect can a novelist have on a culture in which terrorists seem to have hijacked the world's narrative.

We then hear a bit of a broadcaster describing the Kennedys as they move through Dallas, then a short passage from Libra. Then DeLillo begins to speak:

Isolation, solitude, secret plotting. A novel is a secret a writer may keep for years before he lets it out of his room. Writers in hiding, writers in prison. Sometimes their secrets turn out to be dangerous to the state machine. For most writers in the West of course this danger is extremely remote. The cells we live in are strictly personal constructions.

Let's change the room slightly and imagine another kind of apartness. The outsider who builds a plot around his desperation. A self-watcher, a lonely young man, living in a fiction he hasn't bothered to put down on paper. But this doesn't mean he is unorganized, he organizes everything. This is how he keeps from disappearing. His head is filled with dangerous secrets, and he may finally devise a way to come out of his room. He invents a false name, orders a gun though the mail, then looks around for someone famous he can shoot.

 

Here's how The Times listed the program (Sept 27, 1991):

 

Kim Evan's filmed essay about an American novelist who is obsessed by violent images and what they can do to the soul of a 20th century culture like his, is dazzlingly, nay blindingly, assembled. The camera assumes an adversarial role. It is as much a weapon as the guns that feature so strongly in DeLillo's writing. Therefore, there are two ways of interpreting it when we talk of Evan's scenes being shot. More than one viewing of this film will be necessary for those viewers who simply can't keep up with what DeLillo is thinking, writing and seeing. It takes time to digest statments like "Stalking a victim is a way of organizing one's loneliness, making a network out of it" or "I knew I must extend myself until the molecules parted and I was spliced into the image." In his book Mao II, a character says "Keep it simple." Was DeLillo paying attention at the time?

 

 

WEBSITES:

Don DeLillo's America. Ed. Curt Gardner. Feb. 1996-present. <http://www.perival.com/delillo>. Contains much useful information on DeLillo's novels and on critical studies of his works. For a more complete listing of interviews and profiles, readers are encouraged to consult the bibliography compiled by Curt Gardner and Philip Nel on this Website.

The Don DeLillo Society. Ed. Philip Nel. May 1999-present. <http://www.ksu.edu/english/nelp/delillo>. Includes bibliographies of DeLillo's works and critical works, information about events sponsored by the Don DeLillo Society, and news about DeLillo-related publications.

For more web resources, please see the Don DeLillo Society's page of Links.

 

LINKS:

 

There is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is. There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and links, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password -- world without end, amen.

-- Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997)

 

 

 

 

 

Don DeLillo

Next 1/ High School
Objetivo Sorocaba

Profa. Dra. L. Winter

© 2013 by L. Winter

 

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