The play of texts in Don DeLillo's

Abstract

The central concern in my dissertation is how current theories of rhetoric and social construction are made manifest in three of Don DeLillo's novels: Libra, White Noise, and Ratner's Star. Libra demonstrates how the historical figure Lee Harvey Oswald and the events surrounding the assassination of John Kennedy are socially constructed by media imagery and the ambient texts of American culture. White Noise is an extension of Libra in that it details how the discourse of American consumer and political culture construct our sense of self and our relationship to others in our society. Ratner's Star can be read as a systems novel that demonstrates how the fictional artifices of mathematics are analogous to the systems of thought based on discourse found in the metalinguistic formations of science in our civilization. I rely heavily on the theories of Michel Foucault to demonstrate this, and supplement Foucault's thinking with the work of philosophers such as M. M. Bakhtin, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, and composition theorists such as Kurt Spellmeyer. Don DeLillo's novels can also be used in the field of composition as they are excellent exemplars of contemporary discourse theory, and, in an appendix, I provide a sample assignment description and a student's rhetorical analysis of university discourse that is augmented by insights that the student gained from reading White Noise.