Pleasure And Anxiety

Don DeLillo(1936-) is a novelist, playwright, short story writer and essayist in the contemporary American literature. Among the most influential American writers of the past decades, DeLillo has received some awards, such as a National Book Award (White Noise,1985), a PEN/Faulkner Award (Mao Ⅱ,1991), and an American Book Award (Underworld,1998). DeLillo’s works paint the detailed portraits of American life in the late20th and early21st centuries, and his novels have covered fields as diverse as media, mass culture, consumerism, terrorism, violence, science and technologies. The theme related to media and media culture is the central topic in DeLillo’s novel-writing, he profoundly reveals the interaction between the media and all different social and cultural phenomena. Media are the communication tools, and also the diversified modern technologies. In the electronic age, media, the vital communication forms, play a significant role in shaping public opinions and perceptions on a variety of important issues, and in changing people’s lifestyle and the way of thinking. The influence of the media on society have permeated into the cultural horizon, and formed a new cultural system——media culture.Media culture is a culture of the image and deploys sight and sound. Because of deploying the most advanced technologies, it is also regarded as a high-tech culture. In this culture, the technological advances lead to faster development in industry and better products in life. Therefore, media culture is the industrial culture organized on the model of mass production, and produced for the mass audience. In the digital times, media culture is also a contested terrain across which key social groups, the individual and competing political ideologies struggle for domination. In the postmodernist society media technological advances make everything receded into a representation. The world evolves into a world of image, in which people have already abandoned words in favor of images. However, there are two sides to everything. The law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the evolution of the universe. Standing at the other end of the positive factor is the negative factors to everything, media culture has no exception. In the image-centered culture, there are representations not only of people’s great pleasure after meeting their desire, but of the potential contradiction and conflict existed in society.DeLillo’s works cover the different forms of the contemporary media including the photograph, film, TV, advertisement, graffiti and installation. He explores the influence of the media on the real life, the society, the culture and people’s consciousness in his works. And the reflection of this influence becomes more complex and profound in his novels created since the publishing of White Noise. This dissertation takes DeLillo’s eight novels created since the middle of20th century White Noise, Libra, Mao Ⅱ, Underworld, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, The Falling Man and The Point Omega as the examples to interpret the characteristics of media culture with the combination of the different theories of cultural studies, media culture and sociology. In Delillo’s novels, modern people living in the world of image enjoy the unhistorical pleasure, which constructs the positive factors in media culture and is presented by the construction of subject, the carnivalization of consumption, harmonious society, and the magic of science and technology. However, modern people’s all anxieties and conflicts aroused from images evolve into dominance from recessiveness while they are immersed in the pleasure brought from images. The negative aspect of media culture is just revealed by people’s anxieties and has a profound influence on the self-destructive subject, the alienated consumption, the garbage world, the violence and terror. DeLillo’s novels elaborate both the positive aspect——pleasure and the negative one——anxiety of media culture from the four perspectives of the modern subjective construction, the consumerism, the politic and ideology, and the technological development.This dissertation is designed so that each chapter may be read as self-contained unit, and may proceed serially through the chapters to gain a sense of how DeLillo’s novels represent the dual and paradoxical characteristics of media culture.In the open part, there is the general description on DeLillo’s literature review at home and abroad, and the basic introduction on this dissertation. Chapter One dwells on the evolution and theories of media culture in the contemporary American society. And through the description of DeLillo’s early life experience, the dissertation reveals a profound relationship between the mass media and his writing, and explores the different representations of media culture in his novels of the different times. In examining DeLillo’s two different types of artists——the self-constructed and the self-disappeared subjects in Chapter Two, the research lies in the analyses of his four novels Point Omega, The Body Artist, Mao II and Underworld. With the combination of the Gaze theory in the western culture, the research focuses on the two different characteristics of the artist in the media culture——the construction and disappearance. Chapter Three elaborates the two representations of media culture in the point of view of the consumerism:the carnivalization of the desire and the termination of the world revealed in DeLillo’s novels. The media have been reckoned to be the social forces in the media-centered postmodern society. The modern media are helpful to drive the consumption and result in the social phenomenon——alienated consumption. DeLillo represents such an alienated world with the two characteristics of carnivalization and destruction owing to people’s excessive consumption in White Noise, Mao II and Underworld. In Chapter Four, the focus is on the analysis of the relationship between media and history, politics and ideology in the postmodern society of America represented in DeLillo’s novels. The interpretation on White Noise, Libra and Underworld focuses on the relationship of conspiracy between media and individual, history, politics and ideology. DeLillo reveals both the harmonious and contradictory society through his novels. The conspiracy between media and ideology leads to the harmonious aspect and the contradictory one brimming with the conflicts and struggles in the postmodern society as well. Chapter Five turns to the analysis of media culture from the perspective of science and technology in DeLillo’s novels. In White Noise, Mao Ⅱ, Underworld, Cosmopolis and The Falling Man, DeLillo shows such a world that is not only the magic but the dread and is brought from the science and technology. Through the analyses, the dissertation explores the relationship between the media image and the violence, terror and trauma. This chapter also interprets the major theme of the death and the entropized world presented in DeLillo’s novels, and further reveals the two-sided role played by the media technologies in the postmodern society.Through the analyses, the dissertation explores the dual and paradoxical characteristics of pleasure and anxiety on media culture in DeLillo’s literary creation. The duality of the opposite and united are represented from the following aspects:the subject of the artist, the consumerism, the conspiracy between media and ideology, and the relationship between media and science and technology. In the postmodern society, many theorists have proposed some different ideas and opinions on the capitalist society and culture. DeLillo has responded to some of their theories in his novels, and his writings are the identification to some ideas or opinions proposed by the theorists. DeLillo shapes some of artist characters in his novels so as to construct an identity for the subject of the contemporary artists. And through these artist characters, he shows his reflection on the writer’s identity. In his literary creation, DeLillo borrowed many techniques and aesthetic ideas from the movie art so as to make his literary writing blend with the features of the image art. DeLillo’s literary works have proved that literature is possible for the further development in the Image Age, and serve as his challenge to "the end of literature". His novels are the writing practice of the literary "Being-toward-Death". DeLillo’s fictional world reveals his query and critique to technological reason in American postmodern society. His novel-writing is enlightened to readers.