Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo

Graley Herren is Professor and Chair of English at Xavier University, USA. He is the author of Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (2007). He is editor of five volumes in the Text & Presentation book series.

Herren (Xavier Univ.) analyzes a metafictional motif that permeates DeLillo’s entire body of work—mirrors or mirrored realities. He argues that DeLillo and DeLillo’s artist/narrator characters create fictional worlds and represent reality through their art. He also contends that spectators within DeLillo’s works, as in reality, project their personal preoccupations onto art, thereby making art as self-reflexive for observers as it is for the artists who create it. Herren chooses to investigate self-reflexivity in what he deems the most relevant of DeLillo’s texts: he dedicates two chapters apiece to Underworld and Zero K and in other chapters focuses on Americana, Libranth, and later works. In a creative turn at the book’s end, Herren offers a coda in which he recounts a pertinent dream regarding DeLillo and his work. Extensive endnotes elaborate on points throughout the text. Summing Up: Recommended

• Preface Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations 1. How to Make Metafiction: A Genealogy for Don DeLillo’s Self-Reflexive Art 2. American Narcissus: Lacanian Reflections in Americana 3. Libranth: Nicholas Branch’s Joycean Labyrinth 4. “The Martiniad”: Nick Shay as Embedded Author in Underworld 5. The Artistic Gestation of Klara Sax 6. Performing Self-Dialogue in “The DeLillo Variations” 7. Art Stalkers 8. Literary Triangulation: DeLillo – O’Hara – Oates 9. A Miniature Star: Remains and Returns in the Metafiction of Zero K 10. A Portrait of the ARTIS: Jeff Lockhart as Embedded Author in Zero K Coda Bibliography Index