Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2003

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Scroggins, Mark

Abstract

Since its appearance in 1985, Don DeLillo's novel White Noise has been regarded as the prototype of the postmodern novel---though not for style and form, but rather for content and theme. DeLillo's postmodern society is the site of dissipated "structures" of power and authority, the hyperreal realm of simulacrum. The narrator---J.A.K. (a.k.a. Jack) Gladney---cannot fathom this world of disseminated authority, where knowledge and power are continually generated behind what Michel Foucault calls "the great abstraction of exchange". My thesis suggests that Jack's struggle to cope in this society is complicated by his own, exaggerated subjectivity. He is, in the words of Leonard Wilcox, a quintessential "modernist". His plight therefore becomes a proxy battle for these two epics, the modern and postmodern.

Extent

83 p.

Comments

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2003.|Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Identifier

FADT13005

Format

pdf

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