White Noise

White Noise PDF Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440674477
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A brilliant satire of mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a teacher of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America. Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud, unleashed by an industrial accident, floats over there lives, an "airborne toxic event" that is a more urgent and visible version of the white noise engulfing the Gladneys—the radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, and TV murmurings that constitute the music of American magic and dread.

White Noise

White Noise PDF Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440674477
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
A brilliant satire of mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a teacher of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America. Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud, unleashed by an industrial accident, floats over there lives, an "airborne toxic event" that is a more urgent and visible version of the white noise engulfing the Gladneys—the radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, and TV murmurings that constitute the music of American magic and dread.

White Noise

White Noise PDF Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1743295510
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life; a life that is going well enough, until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an 'Airborne Toxic Event' and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear - his own mortality. White Noise is an effortless combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma in which DeLillo exposes our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism. It captures the particular strangeness of life lived when the fear of death cannot be denied, repressed or obscured and ponders the role of the family in a time when the very meaning of our existence is under threat. Winner of National Book Awards' Fiction 1985

White Noise

White Noise PDF Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 9780140274981
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
The National Book Award-winning classic from the author of Underworld and Libra, soon to be a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig White Noise is the story of Jack, his wife, Babette, and their four ultramodern offspring. They live in a college town where Jack is Professor of Hitler Studies (and conceals the fact that he does not speak a word of German), and Babette teaches posture and volunteers by reading tabloids to a group of elderly shut-ins. They are happy enough, until a deadly toxic accident and Babette's addiction to an experimental drug make Jake question everything. White Noise is considered a postmodern classic and its unfolding of themes of consumerism, family and divorce, and technology as a deadly threat have attracted the attention of literary scholars since its publication. This Viking Critical Library edition, prepared by scholar Mark Osteen, is the only edition of White Noise that contains the entire text along with an extensive critical apparatus, including a critical introduction, selected essays on the author, the work, and its themes, reviews, a chronology of DeLillo's life and work, a list of discussion topics, and a selected bibliography.

White Noise

White Noise PDF Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143105981
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The National Book Award-winning classic from the author of Underworld and Libra, now a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Death in Contemporary Popular Culture

Death in Contemporary Popular Culture PDF Author: Adriana Teodorescu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429589336
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
With intense and violent portrayals of death becoming ever more common on television and in cinema and the growth of death-centric movies, series, texts, songs, and video clips attracting a wide and enthusiastic global reception, we might well ask whether death has ceased to be a taboo. What makes thanatic themes so desirable in popular culture? Do representations of the macabre and gore perpetuate or sublimate violent desires? Has contemporary popular culture removed our unease with death? Can social media help us cope with our mortality, or can music and art present death as an aesthetic phenomenon? This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of the social, cultural, aesthetic, and theoretical aspects of the ways in which popular culture understands, represents, and manages death, bringing together contributions from around the world focused on television, cinema, popular literature, social media and the internet, art, music, and advertising.

Libra

Libra PDF Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101042176
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
From the author of the National Book Award-winning novel White Noise comes an eerily convincing fictional speculation on the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.

A Postmodern Reader

A Postmodern Reader PDF Author: Joseph Natoli
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791416389
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
These readings are organized into four sections. The first explores the wellsprings of the debates in the relationship between the postmodern and the enterprise it both continues and contravenes: modernism. Here philosophers, social and political commentators, as well as cultural and literary analysts present controversial background essays on the complex history of postmodernism. The readings in the second section debate the possibility—or desirability—of trying to define the postmodern, given its cultural agenda of decentering, challenging, even undermining the guiding “master” narratives of Western culture. The readings in the third section explore postmodernism’s complicated complicity with these very narratives, while the fourth section moves from theory to practice in order to investigate, in a variety of fields, the common denominators of the postmodern condition in action.

Zero K

Zero K PDF Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501135406
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book A New York Times bestseller, “DeLillo’s haunting new novel, Zero K—his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld” (The New York Times), is a meditation on death and an embrace of life. Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body. “We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?” These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book’s narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.” Don DeLillo’s “daring…provocative…exquisite” (The Washington Post) new novel weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.” “One of the most mysterious, emotionally moving, and rewarding books of DeLillo’s long career” (The New York Times Book Review), Zero K is a glorious, soulful novel from one of the great writers of our time.

Death in Don DeLillo's 'White Noise'

Death in Don DeLillo's 'White Noise' PDF Author: Jan Riepe
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638374491
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 13

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,5, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), course: Proseminar "Postmodern American Fiction after 1975", language: English, abstract: In the following pages I will discuss the role of Death in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” and I will show that the protagonist, Jack Gladney, is not only obsessed with death, but that fear and obsession are the main driving forces in his life. Further it is the aim of this paper to show that Jack Gladney goes through a change, which results in him being able to cope with his fear and that DeLillo holds technology responsible for Jack’s obsessive fear. In order to support the thesis of this paper I will analyze the role that death plays in Jack’s life in regard to his family, his job, consumption and technology. To support the thesis of Jack going through a change I will discuss Jack’s relationship to death before and after the exposure to the chemical spillage and, most important, before and after Jack’s being “nearer to death”, when attempting to kill Willie Mink. Concluding, I will look at the novel’s link between death and technology. Jack Gladney lives with his wife Babette and their children from previous marriages in a house at the end of a quiet street in the quiet town of Blacksmith. He is head of the department of Hilter Studies at the College-on-the-Hill. Jack has specialized on Hitler and built a whole department around this single figure of history. In academic circles he is widely known as the leading expert on Hitler and his articles are printed in the appropriate journals. But Jack neither reads nor speaks the German language, a fact he desperately tries to keep a secret. He hides behind his dark glasses and academic robe. [...]

New Essays on White Noise

New Essays on White Noise PDF Author: Frank Lentricchia
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521398930
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
White Noise, the story of a professor of Hitler Studies and his family, has received much attention and critical acclaim. This collection of essays provides an overview of the author as well as the controversial novel.