- Postmodernity and Metanarratives in DeLillo’s White Noise
Awards
Author(s):
- Dmitri Akers
Category:
- Literature
Institution:
- University of Adelaide
Region:
- Oceania
Winner Category:
- Highly Commended
Year:
- 2020
Abstract:
- Don DeLillo’s work presents itself as an example to test the postmodern incredulity or criticism of metanarratives. This research essay concerns the novel, White Noise, because it is used to test the hypothesis that postmodernism does away with these grand narratives. This is due to its content concerning academia, history, teleology and so on. Through the use of research and close reading skills, the essay elucidates its conclusions by focusing on repeated imagery or subjects. Conclusions are made to put Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory of the postmodern to some scrutiny, in order to find its validity. It is posited that the novel cannot make the jump to completely validate Lyotard’s theory, since there are many ways in which metanarratives or grand narratives stay alive. This investigation showed that White Noise both encompasses and dissents from postmodernism, which is an epoch or grouping of thought, that has become overburdened by its own aspects. That is, Don DeLillo exemplifies the way in which postmodern art cannot allow itself to be defined by its almost indefinability, egalitarian blurring of culture, or myopia. In many ways, the text embodies postmodernity’s own dissent from previous schools of thought, by dissenting from postmodernism itself. This contradictory relationship allows the work of DeLillo to flourish as a true work of art, which cannot be boxed into whatever critical or aesthetic trend had been fostered by certain writers, particularly French Continental philosophy. The argument that postmodernism is a way to experience the world in a splintered and crystallised manner stands up during the investigation.
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