1 - Don de Lillo

Question 1

Don de Lillo
Dates

Answer 1

Donal De Richard deLilo was born 20/11/1936 and he is still alive.
He spent his childhood and adolescence in the Fordham Neighborhood and Italian American part of the Bronx.

Question 2

Lee Harvey Oswald

Answer 2

(1939-1963) = the man judged for the murder of Kennedy in November 1963.

Question 3

About his childhood in the Bronx, said he was always in the streets : quote

Answer 3

“As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn’t know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English.”

Question 4

His hobbies + school

Answer 4

He loved to play sports
Cardinal Hayes High School, a catholic school in the Bronx
. He did not read much until he turned 18 and took a boring summer job working as a parking attendant during which he read a lot : Hemingway, Folkner, Steinbeck or Joyce.

He then registred to Fordham University = a private Jesuit university. In one of his novels : underworld.

Question 5

Jobs

Answer 5

In 1988 he left the Bronx and he went to Manhattan, he took a job in advertising
He quit in 1964 and started working as a free-lance copywriter

Question 6

First Novel ?

Answer 6

He started in 1966 to write his first novel. It took him more than 4 years to finish it. His first novel Americana was published in 1971 by a well-known publishing post in Boston. He was 35 at that time, this first novel got modest critical praise.
⇒ The modernist Joyce Carol Hawkes described him as being perceptive.
It is the most autobiographical of his novels.

→ He realised America was not 1 America but several America.
→ The title of this novel foreshadows the topic of the rest of his work which questions America as a nation and its myths, emblematics objects and ideological constructions.

Question 7

l End Zone, 1972

Answer 7

sport novel
It is also an experimental postmodernist novel, metafictional, going from parody to allegorical fable.
Can be read as a study on the limits of language

Question 8

Great Jones Street in 1973

Answer 8

rock novel. But is also a treaties about the end of civilisation with the triumph of market value and the end of hippie ideals. The novel takes place in a dilapidated New York where artists sell themselves to a fast-commercial system.

Question 9

Ratner’s Star published in 1976

Answer 9

science fiction and science.
⇒ This novel has been compared to the work of Thomas Pynchon and critic Tom Leclare called this novel a “conceptual monster”

Question 10

Players, 1977

Answer 10

a financial thriller dealing with dematerialised finance, Adultery and terrorism pervade the everyday life of a Wall Street couple.

Question 11

Running Dog 1978

Answer 11

twists the code of spies story with irony

Question 12

Reward 1978

Answer 12

In 1978 : was awarded the Guggenheim fellowship and he used it for a trip to the middle-east before settling in Greece where he wrote his next 2 novels.

Question 13

Amazons, 1980

Answer 13

published under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell. It was written with a friend and former colleague : Sue Buck. It is a mock (mémoire) of the first professional American woman to play in the National Hockey League.
⇒ It is far more light-hearted and commercial than the rest of his work.
⇒ He asked editors to take it off from the list of books he wrote.

Question 14

The Name (1982

Answer 14

The novel is about language and a cult. The plot takes place mostly in Greece and Jordans (Jordanie), allowing the author to think about the US from abroad and question what it is like to be an American abroad both culturally and politically and what one’s identity as an American embodies in the eyes of the rest of the world.

⇒ It has been recognised as De Lillo’s maturity novel and was strongly praised by critics.

Question 15

Recognition and appreciation & white noise

Answer 15

White Noise was published in 1985 and De Lillo was at the time back in the US. It is thanks to this novel that he became a respected novelist known outside of small academic circles.

He won in 1985 the National Book award for fiction for White Noise.

Question 16

But white noise…

Answer 16

BUT White Noise is the novel that ended his anonymity. It is also considered as a corner-stone of postmodern literature.

Question 17

The Day Room

Answer 17

He wrote The Day Room right after White Noise. 1st play, the plot takes place in an attic asylum. It was influenced by Beckett, Ionesco and the theatre of the absurd

Question 18

Lybra, 1988

Answer 18

The emphasis is on Kennedy’s murder. He did a lot of research.
However he also got strong criticism for this book
emphasises the role that History plays in his writing.

Question 19

George Will from the Washington Post about Libra

Answer 19

“an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship” (because it questions the fact that Oswald was the only one behind the assassination of Kennedy).

Question 20

Kenned’ys assassination haunts his works

Answer 20

Americana and it ends on the Dealey Plaza in Dallas = the place where Kennedy was killed.

In Underworld the characters watched several times the tragic home movie of Abraham Zapruder (Kennedy)

Question 21

Mao II, 1991

Answer 21

His next novel, Mao II written in 1991 confirmed his will to tackle more contemporary topic with the filters of parody or Comedy.
→ The title comes from a series of Andy Wahrol silk-screen prints depicting MAO.

This invasion of private life made De Lillo question the place of the artist in society and the main character is a novelist who has to leave his quiet life to help free a young and unknown swiss poet taken hostage. Another topic of the book is terrorism.
⇒ He won the Pen Faulkner award for fiction and a reputation s a committed writer and as a guilty conscience of the US.

Question 22

Underworld 1997

Answer 22

it is described as its magnum opus (=sa plus grande oeuvre) with around a hundred characters covering half a century of the history of the US from the beginning of the Cold War to the end of the USSR. The other ambition is also to be a counter-history as he himself declared in an essay.

It became his most acclaimed novel and it has been named by the NY Times book review.

Question 23

The esthetical turn of the 2000s

Answer 23

After the war came the time of Late De Lillo with the abandonment of historical panorama and he came to prefer minor forms and there was also a stylistic turn in his writing. Syntax became more condensed and sentences became shorter aiming for the essential. Even subjects were concerned : time, loss, grief, disappareance, extinction & melancholy. Even political events tend to stay in the margin : The stock market crash, 9/11 or war in 2003 & they are seen in individual reception.

Question 24

Time after his turn of 2000s

Answer 24

Time has become the topos of his novels : geological time, time of brief of trauma, suspended time of life etc..

Question 25

He wrote 3 plays about societal issues

Answer 25

Valparezo 1999 : about threat of influence of media on private identity
Love, Lies, Bleeding in 2005 about euthanasia
The Word for snow in 2007 about Global Warming

Question 26

9/11 attack

Answer 26

considered as the event that opens the 21st century. Paul Auster “and so the 21st century finally begins.”

Question 27

9/11 & De Lillo

Answer 27

Article is about De Lillo 9/11 novel. He had already written about terrorism, paranoia etc and the meaning of contemporary terror is very important in some of his novels like Mao II.

Question 28

In the ruins of the future

Answer 28

Right after the attacks of 9/11, Don de Lillo went to Ground Zero and then wrote an article entitled In the ruins of the future
This idea of counter narrative is crucial after 9/11

Question 29

Cosmopolis, 2003

Answer 29

→ the novel is about Eric, a rich guy working in finance & who need haircut one day a President is in town.
⇒ It’s a reflection about capitalism, the world of finance, strikes, terrorism & about dot com bubble = financial crisis

Question 30

Falling Man, 2007

Answer 30

// biblical illusion & litterary a falling man. About 9/11.

⇒ Depicts postlapsarian New York (=après la chute) & it concentrates on the aftermath of the attacks

Terrorism is not the main topic of the novel & the actions of the terrorists are depicted in 3 short parts that are kind of interlude to the main plot : they don’t mix themselves. Novel focuses on trauma and on difficult reconstruction of the self after the attacks.

Question 31

Critics were divided about Falling Man

Answer 31

Some of them arguing that De Lillo did not try to depict a national feeling or define American identity after the attacks

Others regret it that he did not discuss the historical rangeof the attacks or their political dimension

Question 32

Point Omega, 2010

Answer 32

Follows Falling Man in term of writing & in term of plot chronology : it deals with the 2nd war in Irak (2003-2011) so after 2001. It deals with kidnapping, detention and torture which became legitimate in the US thanks to the 2001 Patriot Act. It takes place in the Californian Desert.

Question 33

The Angel Esmeralda, 2011

Answer 33

A collection of short stories : deals with financial crisis, dot com bubble..

Question 34

Zero K, 2016

Answer 34

Echoes White Noise because it also deals with characters afraid of death. The plot revolves around a clinic and concerns a billionaire who is inspired by the terminal illess of his wife to seek immortality through cryo-preservation.

Question 35

The Silence, 2020

Answer 35

It is about a lockdown : because electronic devices are not working anymore. It describes N-Y dealing with a strange chaotic silence = disaster novel like White Noise & it also uses the catastrophe to reveal the profound fears that it exacerbates. Failing technologies throw a harsh light on human fallibility.