engleski

Spectral Visuality in Novels by Don DeLillo

This graduation paper attempts to demonstrate that the concept of visuality is a concept central to DeLillo’s novels Americana, White Noise, Libra, Falling Man and Point Omega. Even though the connection of the American nation to the concepts of the image and its media proliferation constitutes the central theme of each of the novels analyzed, DeLillo does not limit his approach to visuality to just one visual phenomenon inherent in American culture, but rather portrays a wide array of symptoms of different social pathologies arising from America’s pathological need for a visual representation of its identity. However, there are at least two features that all the novels mentioned share. Firstly, the concept of the image functions as an obstacle to the characters who want to achieve self-knowledge because they are unable to extract their sense of self from a self- referential chain of visual representations. Secondly, all the novels in question establish a link between the effect of the image on the individual psyche and the notion of death, so that the two appear contingent upon each other.

DeLillo; visuality; image; media; consumerism; representation of history;

nije evidentirano