International Journal of English Literature and Culture
 

International Journal of English Literature and Culture

Vol. 3(11), pp. 270-276, December, 2015

 ISSN: 2360-7831

DOI: 10.14662/IJELC2015.091

Review paper

Don DeLillo’s White Noise: An Initial Postmodern Society Struggling with Fledgling Policies of Consumerism

Mohammad Sadegh Najjarzadeha

M.A of English Language and Literatures, University of Tehran, Iran.

E-mail: Msnajjarzadeha@ut.ac.ir

Accepted 15 November 2015

The impact of technology and science could be felt extensively in the present postmodern era and even more tangibly in the American society. The notion of consumerism was strongly propagated in the postmodern families which was a mere slave of technology and its omnivorous progeny, consumerism. Such notions were specifically noticeable in American history which was in fact a history of consumerism. Donald Richard De Lillo (1936) was a postmodern author who paid a comprehensive attention to this issue of technology and consumerism in his novel, White Noise. The plot depicted a family that was unintentionally entangled in the ruling of technology and consumerism. This paper, aimed to explore Don DeLillo's White Noise through the Jean Baudrillard’s theories in some of his most important books regarding the issue of consumerism and its resultant social phenomena in an incipient postmodern period when the norms and policies of consumerism were not fully adopted by the inhabitants . In the novel, Don DeLillo also portrayed how forces like the nominal character of people, death, economics, gender roles and greed for money were combined with the role and dominance of technology and consumerism to form the sociology of a postmodern family. Also, the primary determinant that was technology, was explored in its relation to the other factors. Due to the candidness of most of his futuristic novels, Don DeLillo’s views showed little optimism for success within his fictional postmodern world.

Key Words: Consumerism, Jean Baudrillard, Media, Postmodernism, Sociology, White Noise

Cite This Article As: Najjarzadeha MS (2015). Don De Lillo’s White Noise: An Initial Postmodern Society Struggling with Fledgling Policies of Consumerism. Inter.  J. Eng. Lit. Cult. 3(11): 269-276

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