Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress ...Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998). Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns—the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power—and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques. Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his "modular" working method as well as the evolution of his novels.
“Anachronisms of Authority: Authorship and Exchange Value in David Foster Wallace’s
” considers the materiality of the printed book where postmodern theories of culture intersect with the ...contemporary economics of the print publishing, digital publishing, and antiquarian book industries. The essay elaborates Karl Marx’s writings on exchange value in relation to more recent works of historical-materialist writing by Fredric Jameson, Terry Cochran, and others to build a frame for a reconsideration of Wallace’s incomplete and posthumous novel, thereby proposing a premise for renewed analyses of the contemporary writer and the printed book.
ReviewingVinelandforThe New York Times Book Reviewin early 1990, Salman Rushdie concluded an otherwise light-hearted article by modulating the tone of his review to a serious key:
But what is perhaps ...most interesting, finally, about Mr. Pynchon’s new novel is what is different about it. What is interesting is the willingness with which he addresses, directly, the political development of the United States, and the slow (but not total) steamrollering of a radical tradition many generations and decades older than flower power. . . . What is interesting is to have before us, at the end of
The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi Gordon (book editor), Robert S. C.; Veggian (review author), Henry
Quaderni d'italianistica,
01/2009, Letnik:
30, Številka:
1
Journal Article
East of Eden Meyer, Michael J; Veggian, Henry
2013, Letnik:
16
eBook
This volume includes one dozen new and recent essays on John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1952). First commissioned by the late Professor Michael J. Meyer, a renowned Steinbeck scholar, the volume was ...originally designed to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the novel's publication. The collection contains critical writings from a variety of literary fields. These include the biographical essay, travel essay, essays on varied themes in Steinbeck's works, writings on critical approaches to Steinbeck and also a new essay on Elia Kazan's film adaptation of the novel. This volume is of interest for the Steinbeck scholar, the literary critic and also the casual reader seeking new ways to understand Steinbeck's novel.
The doctoral dissertation examines United States literary and institutional history during the period 1900-1973. The study demonstrates how cryptology was detached from its philological residence ...over three phases (the amateur, institutional, and professional). In the amateur phase, which was regionally specific to the Midwest, the science was characterized by social reformist debate. In the second, institutional phase, the amateur version of cryptology was institutionalized by the United States federal government following WWI to imitate a specific institutional model (that of the French Bureau du Chiffre). During the third, professional phase, the prior two were enhanced during the interwar period by linguists, mechanical engineers, literary modernists, and cryptologists. Running parallel to this narrative is a modern American literary genealogy that, beginning with Henry Adams and extending through Thomas Pynchon, engaged cryptology during that same era. The dissertation locates their discourse within Vichian humanism, and in doing so it first explains how modern literature (and the American novel in particular), its practices, and institutions contributed discursive rhetoric, hermeneutical methods, and institutional models to the emergent 20th century U.S. security state; secondly, it argues that a particular genealogical style that spans the writings of Henry Adams, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, and Thomas Pynchon elaborated an diverse rhetorical discourse by which to respond to that assemblage of new institutional entities, and without which that assemblage would be incoherent.
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