Don Delillo and the Visual

Over the course of a prodigious literary career which now spans seven decades, DeLillo has engaged with the problem and the promise of vision. Don DeLillo and the Visual offers a fresh perspective on the lead writer for the Age of the Image. Whilst the author is sometimes characterised and even caricatured as a ’novelist of ideas’, this study makes a case for DeLillo as a ’body artist’ with a particular fascination for the varieties of visual experience. DeLillo’s work dramatizes diverse ways of seeing: the eye of the artist; the scientific stare; the consumer leer; the plagiarised perception of the tourist; the athlete’s field of sight; and the seer’s sacred vision. Framed by the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the dialectical optic of Walter Benjamin, a series of close readings consider the visuality of writing itself, light and colour, the screen cultures of cinema, television and computer and the ekphrastic depiction of painting and photography.

Brian Jarvis is a senior lecturer at Loughborough University. He has published widely on American literature and film.