Overview

Don DeLillo, American Original is a startlingly original and provocative reinterpretation of one of the most important novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Adopting a direct approach that steers clear of debates with secondary literature and covering the full arc of Don DeLillo’s career from A to Z – Americana (1971) to Zero K (2016) – Michael Naas shows that the extraordinary power, authority, insight, and inventiveness of DeLillo’s fiction are the result of the way it traffics everywhere in contraband goods and narratives, in doubleness or duplicity of every kind, in multiple voices, story lines, times, places, and media that at once interrupt and complement one another. This is a book that invites skimming and dipping, structured into easily digestible sections on everything from weapons and drugs to erotica, nuclear waste, and secret societies, each preceded by humorous and incisive epigraphs from DeLillo's novels. Michael Naas reads DeLillo's fiction as a way of life or as equipment for living, rather than as a critical puzzle to be solved – and thereby opens up new horizons for thinking about why literature matters in the 21st century.

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9781501361821

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Reviews

This is a dazzling work, unlike anything else I have read on DeLillo or indeed on contemporary American literature. It is ingenious, compelling, hilarious, and mischievous, philosophical and literary, scholarly and streetwise, imaginative and inspiring. I know of no other single-volume guide to DeLillo's work that is more comprehensive, original, lucid, and also pedagogically useful. * Nicholas Royle, Professor of English, University of Sussex, UK * Michael Naas makes you remember why you love DeLillo. Extravagantly quoted, Don DeLillo, American Original mines DeLillo's entire body of work, searching out its paradoxical 'contraband' - that which is literally forbidden or unlawful - and reconfiguring it in terms of its contrabanded language - resistance as counterpoint. Such contrapuntal rules of harmony and pulse are the stuff of DeLillo's literary genius and embody his contrabando style - the unauthorized smuggling of incongruous elements into every aspect of the story. Naas's book is an entirely enjoyable read, frequently punctuated by DeLillo's own syncopated rhythms and resonant in its analysis of the author's language. * Jacqueline A. Zubeck, Associate Professor of English, College of Mount Saint Vincent, USA *

No writer has more presciently or powerfully captured the American experience of the last half century than Don DeLillo. This journey through DeLillo's work is an enthusiastic and impressionistic companion to a singular body of American literature. * Ben Rhodes, author of The New York Times bestseller The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (2018), Co-Host of Pod Save the World, and advisor to former President Barack Obama * This is a dazzling work, unlike anything else I have read on DeLillo or indeed on contemporary American literature. It is ingenious, compelling, hilarious, and mischievous, philosophical and literary, scholarly and streetwise, imaginative and inspiring. I know of no other single-volume guide to DeLillo's work that is more comprehensive, original, lucid, and also pedagogically useful. * Nicholas Royle, Professor of English, University of Sussex, UK * Michael Naas makes you remember why you love DeLillo. Extravagantly quoted, Don DeLillo, American Original mines DeLillo's entire body of work, searching out its paradoxical 'contraband' - that which is literally forbidden or unlawful - and reconfiguring it in terms of its contrabanded language - resistance as counterpoint. Such contrapuntal rules of harmony and pulse are the stuff of DeLillo's literary genius and embody his contrabando style - the unauthorized smuggling of incongruous elements into every aspect of the story. Naas's book is an entirely enjoyable read, frequently punctuated by DeLillo's own syncopated rhythms and resonant in its analysis of the author's language. * Jacqueline A. Zubeck, Associate Professor of English, College of Mount Saint Vincent, USA *

Author Information

Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, USA. His most recent books include Plato and the Invention of Life­ (2018) and The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (2015).

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