The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo

Abstract

tW ~ # hat is the postmodern response to the truth claims traditionally made on behalf of moments? By visionary moment, I mean that flash of insight or sudden revelation which critically raises the level of spiritual or self-awareness of fictional character. It is mode of cognition typically represented as bypassing rational thought processes and attaining higher or redemptive order of knowledge (gnosis). There are, conceivably, three types of postmodern response which merit attention here. First, in recognition of the special role literature itself has played in establishing the credibility of moments, postmodern writers might draw on the resources of metafiction to parodically lay bare the essentially literary nature of such moments. Baldly stated, the moment could be exposed as literary convention, that is, concept that owes more to the practice of organizing narratives around sudden illumination (as in, say, the narratives of Wordsworth's Prelude or Joyce's Dubliners) than to reallife experience. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is premised on this assumption. Pynchon's sleuthlike protagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds herself in situation in which clues-contrary to the resolution of the standard detective story-proliferate uncontrollably, thereby impeding the emergence of final enlightenment or stelliferous Meaning (82). It is situation that not only frustrates Oedipa, who is continually tantalized by the sense that a revelation . . . trembled just past the threshold of her understand

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.