“The World Has Become Self-Refering”: Don DeLillo’s THE NAMES and the Aesthetic of the Contemporary
“The World Has Become Self-Refering”: Don DeLillo’s THE NAMES and the Aesthetic of the Contemporary

Summary/Abstract: The essay suggests that Don DeLillo is one of the U. S. authors who have reflected most responsibly on the crisis of modernity’s fundamental institutions and community structures. Compared to the relatively stabilizing deep freeze of the Cold War, the late 1980s and the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall are, as DeLillo shows especially in his post-White Noise works, more interconnected, more “systematic,” and overall more “present.” Focusing primarily on DeLillo’s 1982 novel The Names and its “world presence” theme, the essay addresses the writer’s fascination with the systems that define the contemporary and its “aesthetic” and shows how some individuals set out to resist being defined and confined by our world’s networks of “madness.”

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