The Opposition Of Artists:An Analysis Of The Artists In Don DeLillo’s Underworld And Falling Man

Don DeLillo, born on November 20, 1936, is well acknowledged as a distinguished contemporary American novelist, playwright and essayist. His commercially successful novels have brought him many awards, such as National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and so on.Based on the fact that Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Falling Man are connected in terms of description of major historic events and artists, this thesis studies six interconnected artists who have opposing power, analyzes their artistic creation in the theoretical framework of New Historicism and ethical literary criticism with the purpose of exploring their ethical selection behind their opposition.The six artists in the two novels are widely connected in many ways.Meanwhile, the connectedness provides the precondition for their opposition. From the perspective of New Historicism, Klara’s desert landscape is to aestheticize the politics. On the contrary, Ismael tries to politicize the aesthetics by covering the subway and the billboard with his graffiti. In addition, the artists create their artworks in response to the historic events in American history, such as the Cold War and the 9/11 terrorist attack, which demonstrates the textuality of history and the hisotricity of text. From the perspective of ethical literary criticism, the artists’ opposition can be considered as their ethical selection. Through their ethical selection, they build their ethical identity of being an artist who can spare no efforts to criticize the falling American society and challenge the truth of historic events which have already documented by the American official media. The artists’ opposition in the novels is also a mirror which reflects the fact that Don DeLillo is also a brave artist who opposes whatever the American government tries to impose on him and criticizes the loss of ethics in America by only writing “Peace” as the last paragraph of Underworld, which mainly embodies the values of ethics and the teaching function of literature.