• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.227-242
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• 2006

In a post-modern society where things exist and events happen in the form of Baudrillardian simulation, alterity of the other is erased and transcendence is denied. Don DeLillo's White Noise depicts what may happen in a society where alterity and transcendence are experienced in the neutral and safe forms. It will be argued in this paper that such phenomena reflect the desire of the self to conquer the others and neutralize the existence of them for the self's enduring safety and accomplishment. However, the attempt must fail due to inevitable death. The invincibility of death reminds one of the limit of his ability and the existence of uncontrollable part of the other. This paper will focus on DeLillo's critique of such a society, the affect of the existence of death as an invincible force, and his message about the way to live under these conditions.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2011

Don DeLillo has shown considerable interest in terror, frequently depicting extreme dread of something terrible to happen, in his literary texts. Since more than three thousand innocent people in New York were killed by the 9-11 terrorist attack in 2001, the anticipation about what kind of fiction he would write as a New Yorker was high. DeLillo's novel Falling Man (2007) in fragmentary detail represents the scene of the terrorism from the perspective of Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who escapes the collapsing world trader center. Neudecker's post-traumatic stress disorder in the first chapter is followed by the free-associative portrayal of various impacts of the 9-11 terror on Neudecker's wife Lienne in the second chapter. The random mixture of the first person narratives from such diverse view-point characters as Neudecker's son Justin, relatives and friends, with dialogues and recollections yields a very close picture of the consequences of terrorism. Reading DeLillo's Falling Man in juxtaposition with a Japanese Canadian novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa, reminiscences of the maltreatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the second world war, surfaces the authorial intention of the two novels. They as trauma literature emerge to aim at curing the readers and proposing post-traumatic ethics. Laurie Vickroy's theory of trauma narrative and cure, E. Ann Kaplan's theory of trauma witness narrative and responsibility, and Emmanuel Levinas's theory of trauma memory and ethics offer theoretical grounds for the convincing analysis of the two texts.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.943-974
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• 2012

This paper aims to suggest the compromising vision of nature and technology as the solution to get out of the globally accelerated technology environment in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis. This novel intends to emphasize on the importance of physical environment as a precondition for the survival of human. Eric wants to be a posthuman with the cybernetic idea, pursuing to be the digital self in a vast biosphere that integrates both the nature and the technology. His obsessive worship of technology through his quest for the futurity results in the effacement of the humanity and the insulation from the nature. Cosmopolis is DeLillo's first 9/11 novel, which describes a young-billionaire asset manager Eric's one-day life in New York in April 2000. Eric can be the third Twin Tower as a symbol of global economic hegemony. By the allusion of the 9/11 catastrophic event, it can be said that Eric's fall is caused by his hubris and avarice as a global capitalist. Crossing the 47th Street toward the West in his limousine, his journey is revealed as the environmental reflections on his desires to attain the futurity and transcendence by technology. This novel cautions that the abuse of technology can bring out the obsolescence and erasure of the humanity and the nature. DeLillo suggests that the best hope for the evolutionary possibility of posthuman can be realized through the correlation with nature and technology. This future-oriented novel warns that the excessive technology should not lead to the disappearance of community and humanity, and the separation of self and nature. It admonishes that they should not follow pseudo-cosmopolitanism as the greedy world citizens, devoting on the velocity of newest technology. This novel recommends that humans should be the world citizen of global ecosystem, making the ameliorative environment through the correlation with self/environment and technology/nature, and gardening the restorative biosphere and the younger planet.