Photography in Don DeLillo's Mao Ⅱ
0
조회
0
다운로드
1
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
In Don DeLillo’s Mao II, visual media such as photography seem condemned as the very forces destroying human authenticity and individual uniqueness. As image culture is ominously associated with foreigners, terrorists, and women in the novel, DeLillo is occasionally criticized for Orientalism, racism, and sexism. Although he is not free from the above criticisms of xenophobia and misogyny, he also takes a self-ironizing distance from the rise of the society of spectacle in his own country while offering self-reflective, ambivalent representation of the defeatism of a writer. This irony is produced by his juxtaposition between Bill Gray, an aged, impotent novelist, and Brita Nilsson, a professional photographer. Instead of simply blaming visual media for damaging human consciousness, DeLillo acknowledges photography as an artistic medium and a kind of writing, as he uses several photos in the novel to illuminate his prose. Moreover, DeLillo’s ironic distance from Bill’s defeat paradoxically suggests the lasting value of the “old” art form of the novel in the world dominated by multimedia. This essay discusses how the mass media is shown to be the foreign threat to the white male novelist Bill in Mao II. It subsequently illustrates Brita’s photography having a redemptive force giving life to its objects, in contrast with Bill’s abomination of the mass media. DeLillo insinuates that, used by an individual artist, photography can be a productive tool to express the human mind.
Abstract
In Don DeLillo’s Mao II, visual media such as photography seem condemned as the very forces destroying human authenticity and individual uniqueness. As image culture is ominously associated with foreigners, terrorists, and women in the novel, DeLillo is occasionally criticized for Orientalism, racism, and sexism. Although he is not free from the above criticisms of xenophobia and misogyny, he also takes a self-ironizing distance from the rise of the society of spectacle in his own country while offering self-reflective, ambivalent representation of the defeatism of a writer. This irony is produced by his juxtaposition between Bill Gray, an aged, impotent novelist, and Brita Nilsson, a professional photographer. Instead of simply blaming visual media for damaging human consciousness, DeLillo acknowledges photography as an artistic medium and a kind of writing, as he uses several photos in the novel to illuminate his prose. Moreover, DeLillo’s ironic distance from Bill’s defeat paradoxically suggests the lasting value of the “old” art form of the novel in the world dominated by multimedia. This essay discusses how the mass media is shown to be the foreign threat to the white male novelist Bill in Mao II. It subsequently illustrates Brita’s photography having a redemptive force giving life to its objects, in contrast with Bill’s abomination of the mass media. DeLillo insinuates that, used by an individual artist, photography can be a productive tool to express the human mind.
참고문헌 (17)
- Barrett, Laura, "Here But Also There: Subjectivity and Postmodern Space in Mao II", Modern Fiction Studies, 45, pp.788~810 (1999)
- Begley, Adam, "Don DeLillo: Americana, Mao II, and Underworld", Southwest Review, 82, pp.478~542 (1997)
- Bizzini, Silvia Caporale, "Can the Intellectual Still Speak?: The Example of Don DeLillo’s Mao II", Critical Quarterly, 37, pp.104~119 (1995)
- Carmichael, Thomas, "Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo’s Libra, The Names, and Mao II", Contemporary Literature, 34, pp.204~218 (1993)
- Clifford, James, "The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art" (1988), Harvard UP
- Clifford, James, "Traveling Cultures, In Cultural Studies" (1992), Routledge
- DeLillo, Don, "Mao II" (1991), Penguin
- DeLillo, Don, "White Noise" (1986), Penguin
- Hardack, Richard, "Two’s a Crowd: Mao II, Coke II, and the Politics of Terrorism in Don DeLillo", Studies in the Novel, 36, pp.374~392 (2004)
- 황은주, "Artists in a Marketplace: Art and Multinational Capitalism in Don DeLillo’s Mao II andUnderworld", 미국소설, 14(1), pp.189~210 (2007), 미국소설학회
- Kavadlo, Jesse, "Recycling Authority: Don DeLillo’s Waste Management", Critique, 42, pp.384~401 (2001)
- McClure, John, "Late Imperial Romance" (1994), Verso
- Moran, Joe, "Don DeLillo and the Myth of the Author-Recluse", Journal of American Studies, 34, pp.137~152 (2000)
- Osteen, Mark, "Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo’s Mao II", Modern Fiction Studies, 45, pp.643~674 (1999)
- Scanlan, Margaret, "Writers Among Terrorists: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and the Rushdie Affair", Modern Fiction Studies, 40, pp.229~252 (1994)
- Wilcox, Leonard, "Terrorism and Art: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Jean Baudrillard’s the Spirit of Terrorism", Mosaic, 39(2), pp.89~105 (2006)
- 유정완, "돈 들릴로: 포스트모던 오리엔탈리스트?", 미국소설, 17(1), pp.27~50 (2010), 미국소설학회