Preface Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations 1. How to Make Metafiction: A Genealogy for Don DeLillo’s Self-Reflexive Art 2. American Narcissus: Lacanian Reflections in Americana 3. Libranth: Nicholas Branch’s Joycean Labyrinth 4. “The Martiniad”: Nick Shay as Embedded Author in Underworld 5. The Artistic Gestation of Klara Sax 6. Performing Self-Dialogue in “The DeLillo Variations” 7. Art Stalkers 8. Literary Triangulation: DeLillo – O’Hara – Oates 9. A Miniature Star: Remains and Returns in the Metafiction of Zero K 10. A Portrait of the ARTIS: Jeff Lockhart as Embedded Author in Zero K Coda Bibliography Index
Examines Don DeLillo’s career-long meditation on art, artists, and spectators.
Graley Herren is Professor and Chair of English at Xavier University, USA. He is the author of Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (2007). He is editor of five volumes in the Text & Presentation book series.
Herren (Xavier Univ.) analyzes a metafictional motif that permeates
DeLillo’s entire body of work—mirrors or mirrored realities. He
argues that DeLillo and DeLillo’s artist/narrator characters create
fictional worlds and represent reality through their art. He also
contends that spectators within DeLillo’s works, as in reality,
project their personal preoccupations onto art, thereby making art
as self-reflexive for observers as it is for the artists who create
it. Herren chooses to investigate self-reflexivity in what he deems
the most relevant of DeLillo’s texts: he dedicates two chapters
apiece to Underworld and Zero K and in other chapters focuses on
Americana, Libranth, and later works. In a creative turn at the
book’s end, Herren offers a coda in which he recounts a pertinent
dream regarding DeLillo and his work. Extensive endnotes elaborate
on points throughout the text. Summing Up: Recommended
*CHOICE*
The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo provides a framework and
insights that are highly interesting, original, and readable, while
at the same time being intensive, developed, and deep. DeLillo's
work benefits from Graley Herren's effective combination of strong
close reading as well as his varied, sophisticated theoretical
lenses, which demonstrate the many ways in which DeLillo's fiction
both reflects our, and creates its own, world.
*Jesse Kavadlo, Professor of English and Humanities, Maryville
University of St. Louis, USA, and author of Don DeLillo: Balance at
the Edge of Belief (2003)*
Graley Herren provides accessible, elegant proof of yet another set
of themes and methods woven into DeLillo’s astoundingly intricate
art. Through close analysis of both well-known and underappreciated
texts, Herren reveals how the multifaceted metaphor of mirrors has
served DeLillo in fascinating, virtually innumerable ways, and that
his self-reflexive depictions of artists and the creative process
constitute a career-long argument for the salvific potential of art
itself.
*Tim Engles, Professor of English, Eastern Illinois University,
USA, and author of White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North
American Literature (2018)*
A welcome addition to the DeLillo shelf, it should rank with the
indispensable studies of this author. Original, fresh, and at times
startling, Herren’s readings are enhanced by his scrupulous
attention to prior DeLillo criticism. One sees considerable tracts
of the now vast scholarly conversazione succinctly laid out,
celebrated, and resourcefully augmented.
*Modern Philology*
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