Wired: Power, paranoia and representation in the novels of Don DeLillo

The dissertation's primary claim is that postmodernism has revised contemporary understanding of three problems central to literary, political and philosophical modernism: power, paranoia and representation. Jean Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum, Michel Foucault's analysis of disciplinary technologies and the novels of Thomas Pynchon are starting points for discussion. Studied in close relation these writers provide, it is argued, a framework for demonstrating that power is a "discursive" (postmodern) rather than repressive (modernist) function. Each presents a theory or model of a "transparent" power (Foucault) in reaction to contemporary social and non-social media which manifest three implicit traits of representational systems: simulation, surveillance or mediation. The media examined in this context include, among others, television, film, science, military-industrial technologies, language, media, journalism, systems theory, literature and writing. The dissertation then argues that DeLillo's nine novels use these topics as fictional settings and subjects to show how literature can represent and resist representation as a discursive form of power. As in Pynchon especially, questions of agency, economic and political dialectics, technological progress, language and aesthetics are framed by metafictional concerns with signification: the status of literature, word and image. As in Baudrillard and Foucault, the self is a "terminal" or site of inscription by technologies and systems of representation which largely displace potential for dialectical (especially Marxist) resistance. Discursive power thus gives rise in DeLillo to radical hermeneutic paranoia as an integral component of what the dissertation terms a "paradystopic" social and social novel. Yet like poststructuralist philosophy, DeLillo's books also discover in their skeptical mode possibilities for representational and interpretive "play" that make them sites of thrilling formal, generic and linguistic experiment.