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Libranth: Nicholas Branch's Joycean Labyrinth In Don Delillo's Libra, Graley Herren Jan 2018

Libranth: Nicholas Branch's Joycean Labyrinth In Don Delillo's Libra, Graley Herren

Faculty Scholarship

Libra is a metafictional labyrinth. CIA historian Nicholas Branch is not only a character in the novel but also the embedded author of the narrative. James Joyce used this autological approach in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Libra replicates this metafictional structure, borrowing a number of themes and motifs from Stephen Dedalus and the mythical artificer Daedalus along the way. Although Dedalus succeeds in using his art as wings to escape his imprisonment, Branch ultimatley fails. The artifice he creates becomes his metafictional prison.

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The Terror Of The Political: Community, Identity, And Apocalypse In Don Delillo's Falling Man, Dillon Rockrohr May 2017

The Terror Of The Political: Community, Identity, And Apocalypse In Don Delillo's Falling Man, Dillon Rockrohr

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Falling Man by Don DeLillo casts the event of 9/11 and its aftermath in such a way that the novel itself enacts an aesthetic terror aimed at explicating the ubiquitous social-atmospheric elements of community- and identity-formation out of which terror precipitates. As DeLillo figures terrorism in the novel as apocalyptic in that it is a violence that reveals the violence constitutive of political community, including the political community of liberal democracy, which ostensibly relegates violence to domains not considered legitimately political. DeLillo’s novel, as an act of aesthetic terrorism, not only thematizes the instantiation of terror that precipitates out of …

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"Proof Of The Loop": Patterns Of Habitual Denial In Tim O'Brien's In The Lake Of The Woods And Don Delillo's Libra, Tim Engles Jan 2015