Television and Literature: David Foster Wallace's Concept of Image-Fiction, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland

oder: Ein Versuch über die Rolle der Literatur im Zeitalter des Zappens. Zustandegekommen mit der Hilfe von Jeanne "Zucchini" Salchli, die die Arbeit in eine Form brachte, die auch für englische Muttersprachler erträglich ist. Darf frei kopiert, kritisiert und ignoriert werden. Sehr erwünscht sind Fragen und Kommentare: vhummel@foni.net

Table of contents

1. Television and literature: an introduction

2. David Foster Wallace's concept of image-fiction

2.1 Wallace's theoretical ideas

2.2 "Little Expressionless Animals" as image-fiction

3. White Noise as image-fiction

3.1 The mediation of all experience in White Noise

3.1.1 The management of reality through language

3.1.3 The blending of the real and the simulated

3.2 Reconfigurations of subjectivity in White Noise

3.2.1 The reconfigured self

3.2.2 The return of the repressed: death in a culture of simulation

3.2.3 Authority in the age of the media

3.3 Auratic and sublime experiences in a media-culture

4. The representation of television in Vineland

4.1 Boundary crossings: Vineland's formal and ontological "flow"

4.1.1 Formal boundary crossings: Vineland's narrative flow

4.1.2 Existential boundary crossings: Vineland's ontological flow

4.2 The political implications of television in Vineland

4.2.1 The myth of the objective image

4.2.2 Television and Trauma

5. Summary

Bibliography

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