{"title":"War as Haiku: The Politics of Don DeLillo’s Late Style","authors":"Matthew Shipe","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.102","url":null,"abstract":"In the wake of Underworld (1997), Don DeLillo’s work has been cast largely in a minor key. In this essay, I will focus on Point Omega, the work that I believe most clearly illuminates the political implications of DeLillo’s late style as it tackles the consequences of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. More broadly, I hope to connect Point Omega to the work of DeLillo’s contemporaries that have also speculated on the historical and political implications of the War on Terror. Centering on Point Omega, I am interested in how DeLillo has adopted a distinctive narrative form in his most recent fiction that frequently unsettles and complicates the historical narratives that he had established in his earlier work.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67507178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Weekend Warriors: DeLillo’s “The Uniforms,” Players , and Film-to-Page Reappearance","authors":"Matthew Luter","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.134","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that what DeLillo refers to as the “radical intent” attached to the early short story “The Uniforms” does not point to political radicalism but instead to a new way of thinking about adaptation. This aesthetically radical form of film-to-page adaptation does not privilege the source text, oftentimes subverting the source’s original purpose outright. This decentering of the cinematic source text also lets DeLillo expresses doubt about what film can accomplish politically, while emphasizing that the basic grammar of cinema can do things that literature cannot.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67507811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Deep Insider’s Elegiac Tribute: The Work of Don DeLillo in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest","authors":"Graham Foster","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.127","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the influence the work of Don DeLillo has on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), scrutinising the way Wallace built some of his most important themes on a foundation of literary allusion, particularly to the DeLillo novels End Zone (1972) and Americana (1971). This article also incorporates the use of archival material that shows both authors corresponding about literature and writing, which is also illuminating when investigating the origins of Infinite Jest’s sub-textual meaning. In order to thoroughly describe the theoretical import of this relationship, this article also considers Wallace’s engagement with the critical theories of influence, specifically his overt and creative use of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) in the novel.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67507433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: On Influence","authors":"Crystal Alberts","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.198","url":null,"abstract":"Don DeLillo's works have been mapped through various networks of influence throughout their prolific reception history. This special issue addresses these aspects of influence on the 45th anniversary of the publication of Americana.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67507544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Gathering Facts for the End of the World\": Don DeLillo's Archive of Global Turbulence","authors":"C. Collins","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.177","url":null,"abstract":"Over his career, Don DeLillo grows to inhabit more complex and critical ideas about politics, capitalism, and strategies for opposition than the remote affect of his earlier work might suggest. As part of this project, he developed an advanced analysis of conditions under the global finance regimes gaining strength in the West. The author's papers at the Harry Ransom Center show that he arrived at this informed position through a program of independent research, his newspaper cuttings from this period vividly demonstrating reflections on the meaning of US global power. Once back in New York, his investment in public intellectual debates on the meaning of \"terrorism\" led to a characteristic but problematic emphasis on free speech as a political issue. More recently, his work has turned to sophisticated theoretical texts for increasingly subtle ideas about globalization and its opponents.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67507514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"’Freud is finished, Einstein’s next’: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis , Chaos Theory, and Quantum Entanglement","authors":"Crystal Alberts","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.196","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that, in Cosmopolis, DeLillo returns to mathematical topics and formal structures, like those presented in Ratner's Star, and expands them to reflect more recent developments in science and technology to contemplate time—the subject that permeates many of his twenty first century novels—and to highlight, variously, the unpredictable, uncertain, interconnected, and illusory nature of the contemporary world. Written in between the dot-com bubble burst and the aftermath of September 11, 2001, this essay asserts that Cosmopolis is liminal: it offers a glimpse of the ruins of the future, and as one of its rejected titles suggests, it approaches an omega point. Drawing heavily on archival research in the Don DeLillo Papers at University of Texas, Austin's Harry Ransom Center, this essay contends that Cosmopolis is a thought experiment, of sorts, in which DeLillo incorporates his substantial and ongoing research on strange attractors, quantum entanglement, and the physics of time to consider the \"[t]wo forces in this world, past and future.\" In doing so, this essay suggests that DeLillo calls for a reassessment of the time in which this text is set and proposes an alternate way of perceiving the post-9/11 world.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67507960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Eve, S. Pöhlmann, S. Bourcier, J. Freer, Doug Haynes
{"title":"Announcing the Digital Availability of Pynchon Notes","authors":"M. Eve, S. Pöhlmann, S. Bourcier, J. Freer, Doug Haynes","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.199","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67508238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Utopia and Debt in Postmodernity; or, Time Management in Inherent Vice","authors":"James Liner","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.174","url":null,"abstract":"The category of postmodernism has come under renewed scrutiny in recent years. Indeed, it has become rather commonplace to pronounce the death or obsolescence of postmodernism today. Unsurprisingly, the increasingly questioned status of postmodernism also impacts the field of Pynchon studies. This article reads Inherent Vice as symptomatic not of the end but of a transformation of postmodernism and postmodernity. Pynchon’s novel simultaneously registers a contemporary intensification of postmodern/late capitalism and, crucially, participates in a minor current in postmodernism, one which insists on collective agency and utopian thinking despite the atomization and isolation of subjects accomplished by late capitalism and which, against all odds, remembers how to think historically—or better, invents new ways of thinking historically.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67507878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Dual Man [and Oeuvre], Aimed Two Ways at Once”: The Two Directions of Pynchon’s Life and Thought","authors":"A. Rolls","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.188","url":null,"abstract":"The paper argues that Pynchon’s publishing career underscores a biographical divide in Pynchon’s consciousness between his commitment to marginalized, anti-orthodox modes of being, particularly those valued by the counterculture that emerged in the 1960s in the US, and the value of classical, to use a term from Pynchon’s Ford Foundation statement, modes of being, not simply in his fiction but in his letters and other biographical documents that have come to light.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":"111 3S 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67507699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"I Just Look at Books\" : Reading the Monetary Metareality of 'Bleeding Edge'","authors":"S. Pöhlmann","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.189","url":null,"abstract":"The essay analyzes Bleeding Edg e for its pervasive representation of money, arguing that it operates as a metareality in the novel both on the levels of plot and style. Money is presented as a symbolic structure behind reality that is accessible to the initiated, the interpretation of which offers genuine insight about the world and its interrelations, in parallel to religious or scientific discourses. This does not simply mean that everything—politics, society, culture, technology, etc.—is ultimately determined by economic factors, but rather that money underlies the reality of these phenomena like a kind of source code, and that it is readable as such, for better or worse. In the novel, real and virtual money is heavily associated with moral values and their loss, although it is not at all only associated negatively with greed and the abuse of power. Money also harbors subversive potential in Bleeding Edge , as it can uncover corruption and fraud as much as other conspiratorial phenomena (especially in connection to 9/11). In particular, cash money can become an alternative medium of communication that combines the private and the public. Money does exhibit a tendency towards moral corruption in the novel, but at the same time it eludes any complete control and remains an economic as well as symbolic tool that can undermine the very capitalist system it seems to perpetuate.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67507722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}