This final passage exemplifies how DeLillo operates from the inside of the cultural institutions that he is assessing to instigate a dialogue with postmodern culture that takes place in the very language we speak, albeit one more beautifully rendered and ironically gauged, one that borrows familiar formulae but maintains a measured opposition. Masking its critique in celebration, White Noise inhabits the very heart of postmodern culture to weigh its menaces against its marvels, alerting us to its wonder as well as its waste.
Mark Osteen
WORKS CITED
Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988.
DeLillo, Don. Americana . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1989.
Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
"An Interview with Don DeLillo." By Tom LeClair. Contemporary Literature 23 (1982): 19-31.
Mao II. New York; Viking, 1991.
"An Outsider in This Society." Interview by Anthony DeCurtis.
In Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.
Ferraro, Thomas J. "Whole Families Shopping at Night!" In New Essays on White Noise, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Lentricchia, Frank. Introduction to New Essays on White Noise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Wilcox, Leonard. "Baudrillard, DeLillo's White Noise, and the End of Heroic Narrative." Contemporary Literature 32 (1991): 346-65.
White Noise
To Sue Buck and to Lois Wallace
I Waves and Radiation