Twilight Of Humanism

This dissertation starts from the paradoxes of the Anthropocene in White Noise that the human's inscription and domination of nature lead to the Anthropocene beyond their comprehension and control,and then unveils Don DeLillo's reevaluation of humanism in the context of the Anthropocene.Chapter one reveals a cognitive paradox of the Anthropocene that people cannot understand their inscription upon nature.The mutative,complex and eventful Anthropocene overthrows characters' notion of nature.This phenomenon results from the human scale's distortion and representation of their ecological inscription.The short-sighted human scale provokes them to transfer ecological threats to the distant future and “the unimagined communities” until a catastrophe arrives here and now.The accumulative brutal inscription hinders them from identifying with the Anthropocene's qualitative changes.The superior human scale also disorients them in “the second nature” constructed by cultural representation.Their perception of the Anthropocene is effaced by meaningless information in the medium,anesthetized aesthetics and the utopian simulacrum of the supermarket.The unknowable ecological inscription mocks the human's claim as “the measure of all things”.In terms of control,chapter two reflects the paradox of the Anthropocene as “domination without subject”.Enchanted technology indulges people with ignorant abuse and destructive creation.Nyodene D grows into a “hyperobject” in a technological dysfunction.Immense and long-lasting,it impacts their environment's habitability and sustainability.It is a “monster” born in the laboratory of the Anthropocene.Characters become “Frankenstein”,reduced from creators to the homeless,helpless and hopeless exiles in the man-made disaster.They are no longer the subject of nature and progressive history.They cannot master reality.Their hope for the future is exhausted by deathward linearity,déjà vu,and predestination.The unmanageable Anthropocene mocks human mastery.Chapter three explores twilight of humanism embedded in these two paradoxes of the Anthropocene and reveals DeLillo's posthumanist perspective.Immersed in the heroic embellishment of humanity and social structures' self-protection,characters create an illusion of human exceptionalism and evade the reality of the Anthropocene.Their dichotomy distinguishes the human from the nonhuman by rationality and reifies the nonhuman.DeLillo shows its self-subversion by Sister Marie's satire of rationality and Siskind's absurd “killer/dier” theory.The dichotomy fabricates absolute truth in relative values and separates an imaginary enemy from an interrelated and coexisting system,which causes the Anthropocene's ecological disequilibrium.The novel also highlights that their pursuit of transcendence increases the environment's entropy.The extension of man and their knowledge's exteriorization to technology liquidate knowledge and produce a series of closed systems,which leads them towards the “Entropocene”.