『Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize』のカバーアート

Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize

Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize

著者： Jeffrey Severs & Michael Streit
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 With episodes in which two devoted readers (Jeffrey Severs and Michael Streit) unpack his deadpan, hilarious, and disturbing works one by one, DDSWTNP is dedicated to the idea that Don DeLillo, the greatest of living writers, deserves every serious reader’s attention. Contact: ddswtnp@gmail.com. @delillopodcast. **Support our work and our trip to DeLillo's archive**: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/delillopodcast アート 文学史・文学批評
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  • Episode 29: "Human Moments in World War III"

    Episode 29: "Human Moments in World War III"
    2025/09/08

    In Episode 29, DDSWTNP go to space to get a good look at the earth in a time of war, turning to one of DeLillo’s greatest short stories, “Human Moments in World War III,” first published in July 1983. We examine this tale of two future astronauts who have become soldiers for its strategic engagement with the tropes of science fiction, its eerie portrayals of the so-called “Overview Effect” available from a spacecraft window, and its compression and renewal of motifs from Americana, End Zone, and Ratner’s Star. Nostalgia, patriotism, history, the soldier’s mindset in following inhuman commands, and even the role of poetry and voice – all these come to be recast in DeLillo’s shrewd take on an era of “Star Wars” defense initiatives, a Cold War giving way to hot wars, and very tricky ways out of Mutually Assured Destruction. Along the way we read the 1980s thoughts of an expert on lasers in space, consider what it means to have an alien perspective on one’s earthly home and diurnal rhythms, and speculate on connections between “Human Moments” and White Noise still to come.

    Texts referred to and discussed in this episode:

    Don DeLillo. “Human Moments in World War III.” Published in Esquire (July 1983) and reprinted in The Angel Esmeralda (2011).

    Philip M. Boffey. “Laser Weapons: Renewed Focus Raises Fears and Doubts.” New York Times, 9 March 1982. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/09/science/laser-weapons-renewed-focus-raises-fears-and.html

    Summary of the Overview Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

    The first scene of War Games (1983): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6aCpS0-yls

    Our intro’s clip of DeLillo reading from “Human Moments in World War III” comes from this October 2012 event at the New York Public Library: https://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/angel-esmeralda-don-delillo-conversation-jonathan-franzen

    The interlude sound effect is from Burns and Allen, featuring Ray Noble, “Rah Rah in Omaha” (1940).
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    1 時間 56 分
  • Episode 28: Librarama

    Episode 28: Librarama
    2025/08/07
    We’re still not done with Libra – or Libra is not done with us! In Episode 28, DDSWTNP pick up threads left hanging after our three-part treatment of DeLillo’s JFK novel. While tackling a wide variety of subjects, this episode homes in on Anthony DeCurtis’s 1988 interview with DeLillo for Rolling Stone (and later re-published in expanded form), “An Outsider in This Society.” We’re led to discuss DeLillo’s canny interview articulations in general, his method of writing by day and reading more history by night, and his reply to the suggestion that on the basis of Libra some readers regarded him as “a member of the paranoid left”: “I don’t have a program.” Along the way we also draw in vivid evidence of how DeLillo subtly reworked the voice of Marguerite Oswald from testimony in the Warren Report, what fellow Oswald novelist Norman Mailer had to say about Libra, and all that is illuminated by an exchange of letters to the New York Times between DeLillo and one of the Warren Report investigators. We also try here to understand as fully as possible the nuances of DeLillo’s ideas about historical fiction that emerge in the incredible DeCurtis interview: what DeLillo means when he says Libra is “a piece of work which is obviously fiction,” touts novels’ ability to “redeem” readers’ “despair,” and makes the powerful claim that “fiction rescues history from its confusions.” We quote enough that listeners will get plenty of insight even without having read the DeCurtis interview in full, and we look forward to applying many of the lessons about history learned here to future works like Underworld. “Some stories never end,” as DeLillo writes to begin “Assassination Aura,” and that’s true of this episode’s cover image, which uses a National Enquirer cover from March 2025 about new releases of JFK files. The interlude clip near the beginning is from Oswald’s August 1963 interviews on WDSU-TV in New Orleans. Finally, as we note in the episode, thanks to Joel in Toronto for an Instagram comment (we’re @delillopodcast) that inspired our return to the DeCurtis interview. Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode: Aristotle, Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author.” Trans. Richard Howard. https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf David W. Belin, “‘Libra’ and History.” Letter to the editor, New York Times, September 4, 1988. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/04/books/l-libra-and-history-487988.html Mark Binelli, “Intensity of a Plot [interview with Don DeLillo].” Guernica, July 17, 2007. https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/ Marc Caputo, “CIA admits shadowy officer monitored Oswald before JFK assassination, new records reveal.” Axios, July 5, 2025.https://www.axios.com/2025/07/05/cia-agent-oswald-kennedy-assassination Hal Crowther, “Clinging to the Rock: A Novelist’s Choices in the New Mediocracy.” In Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia, Duke UP, 1991, 83-98. Anthony DeCurtis, “‘An Outsider in This Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” South Atlantic Quarterly (1990) 89 (2): 281-304. (Expanded version of Rolling Stone interview published November 17, 1988 (see https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/qa-don-delillo-69452/). Also published in this expanded form in Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia, Duke UP, 1991, 43-66; and in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro, Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2005, 52-74. See as well https://perival.com/delillo/ddinterviews.html.) Don DeLillo, “Jack Ruby’s Timing.” Letter to the editor [reply to David W. Belin], New York Times, October 2, 1988. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/02/books/l-jack-ruby-s-timing-312488.html Paul Edwards, “Libra at Steppenwolf: John Malkovich Adapts Don DeLillo.” Text and Performance Quarterly (1995) 15:3, 206-228. Gerald Howard, “The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Hungry Mind Review, 1997. (“Mailer calls him Doctor Joyce. You and I know that he’s a priest.”)http://web.archive.org/web/19990129081431/www.bookwire.com/hmr/hmrinterviews.article$2563 Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. On DeLillo’s creation of Marguerite Oswald, see pp. 194-96. Thomas LeClair, “An Interview with Don DeLillo,” Contemporary Literature 23.1 (1982): 19-31. (Republished in DePietro, ed., Conversations.) Norman Mailer, Letter to Don DeLillo, August 25, 1988. In Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. Ed. J. Michael Lennon. New York: Random House, 2014. 1092. David Remnick, “Exile on Main Street [interview with Don DeLillo].” New Yorker, September 7, 1997. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/09/15/exile-on-main-street-don-delillo-profile-remnick Jean Stafford, A Mother in History. New York: Farrar Straus & ...
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    2 時間 30 分
  • Episode 27: Libra (3)

    Episode 27: Libra (3)
    2025/06/16

    So who killed JFK? We still don’t know, but we’re concluding our series on DeLillo’s conspiratorial history with Episode 27: Libra (3). This episode begins by focusing on the unexpected injection of humor and depth that comes with Jack Ruby, another reluctant shooter, in the novel’s second part. We draw into this episode some comparisons of Libra to other artists’ paranoid visions of conspiracy, including Oliver Stone, Norman Mailer, and Thomas Pynchon. We spend ample time on the newspaper-clipping and TV-watching of CIA wife Beryl Parmenter, one of several figures here who make Libra a canny narrative of media and information history. And we close with detailed debate and speculation about why DeLillo’s concluding “Author’s Note” – with its powerful notion that “readers may find refuge here” – has changed over the years. Like Nicholas Branch, we're overwhelmed by all that still could be said about Libra (and we may still say it in a future episode!), but we conclude our three-part analysis here.

    References and corrections for this episode:

    “Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, and the Gun.” BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc

    Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.” chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf

    JFK (dir. Oliver Stone, 1991).

    Frank Lentricchia, “Libra as Postmodern Critique.” In Frank Lentricchia, ed., Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham, NC: Duke U. Press, 1991), 193-215.

    George F. Will, “Shallow Look at the Mind of an Assassin.” Washington Post, September 22, 1988.

    Correction and references on Carmine Latta and Sam Giancana: DeLillo’s character Carmine Latta is indeed based on Carlos Marcello (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Marcello), but we misstate the name of mobster Sam Giancana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Giancana).

    Interlude clips include the voices of Jack Ruby and Marguerite Oswald.
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    46 分
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