Loud Fictions: Noise in the Contemporary American Novel

In his 1946 essay, ‘Silence,’ the English novelist Aldous Huxley described the twentieth century as ‘the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire – we hold history’s record for them all’ (149). Writers of the early twentieth century saw noise as a symptom and consequence of modernity and modernist writing, as Josh Epstein notes, was ‘infiltrated’ by ‘the sounds of air-raid sirens, trains, typewriters,

View More Loud Fictions: Noise in the Contemporary American Novel

DeLillo, Aesthetics, The Cold Iraq War

As one of the most important American writers of the late-twentieth century – alongside Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon in particular – Don DeLillo is a notable target of…

View More DeLillo, Aesthetics, The Cold Iraq War

Still Here: Post-Millennial Metafiction and Crypto-Didacticism

In 1993, David Foster Wallace published an essay piece entitled “E Unibus Pluram” in which he outlined his belief that fiction should move away from the ‘critical and destructive’ postmodern irony that he saw as…

View More Still Here: Post-Millennial Metafiction and Crypto-Didacticism