Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man(Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction)

A collection of original, stimulating interpretations of key texts by Don DeLillo, designed for students and edited and written by leading scholars in the field. The book offers new perspectives on two of the most important pre-millennial novels by any American writer Mao II and Underworld and the first extended discussions of Falling Man, DeLillo's exploration of 9/11 and its aftermath. An American Studies approach to the texts brings together both established DeLillo scholars and other academics whose interdisciplinary methodologies drawn from history, ethnic studies, new economic criticism, women's studies, art history, and urban studies shed new light on DeLillo's work and demonstrate its wide-ranging significance in contemporary American culture.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Don DeLillo and the Dream Release Stacey Olster \ PART I: Mao II \ Introduction \ 1. Delphic DeLillo: Mao II and Millennial Dread, David Cowart \ 2. Mao II, and the New World Order, Peter Knight \ 3. Mao II and Mixed Media, Laura Barrett \ PART II: Underworld \ Introduction \ 4. Underworld, Memory, and the Recycling of Cold War Narrative, Thomas Hill Schaub \ 5. Underworld and the Architecture of Urban Space, David L. Pike \ 6. Underworld, Ethnicity, and Found Object Art: Reason and Revelation, Josephine Gattuso Hendin \ PART III. Falling Man \ Introduction \ 7. Global Horizons in Falling Man, John Carlos Rowe \ 8. Bodies in Rest and Motion in Falling Man, Linda S. Kauffman \ Notes on Contributors \ Further Reading \ Index

About the Author :
Stacey Olster is Professor of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA. She is the author of Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction (1989) and The Trash Phenomenon: Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture, and the Making of the American Century (2003), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (2006). Stacey Olster is Professor of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA.

Review :
This is a beautifully coherent collection of essays on DeLillo's three most important recent novels. It is also much more than that. The volume reflects on, tells us much about, and revises views of, DeLillo's entire oeuvre, American literature and culture broadly, modernist and postmodernist theory, and the other arts (including photography, performance art, film). Anyone with any interest in contemporary culture should know this book. Led by the level-setting eloquent and erudite Olster, the contributors comprise the most exciting scholars in American literary and cultural studies today. Fittingly for a volume on DeLillo, reading it you will never forget that these are people who can write. ... readers should appreciate the series' clear purpose and excellent essays. The series is a welcome addition to scholarship. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. Don DeLillo is perhaps the most important novelist alive and this collection of essays and thoughts does much to elucidate why that is. This collection reads less like an anthology than a cohesive examination of DeLillo's recent work, creating intellectual momentum where essays anticipate and reinforce each other as ideas echo across texts ... This results in a collection greater than the sum of its parts.