History, Biography, and Narrative in Don DeLillo's Libra

Thomas, Glen

doi:10.2307/441866

Cited by 9 publications

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“…Glen Thomas (1997) states that Oswald's diary "is marked by a split in the narrating subject, so that Oswald himself becomes both subject and object of the entries." (112) For example, he depicts his suicide attempt using Hidell's voice in the present tense as if it were a scene from a play in which he is the actor.…”

Section: The Multiplicity Of Times Inside the Room Of Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading History across Space: The Room of Theories as a Web of Multiple Times in Don DeLillo’s Libra

2022

JJMLL

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This paper sheds light on the changing perspective of historiographic time in postmodernism and its tendency towards spatialization, as displayed in Don DeLillo's Libra (1988). The paper suggests that Branch’s room of theories leads to the spatialization of historiographic time in the narrative, considering that this room is the space where history leaves its imprints and where the past intersects with the present. Noting that spatialistion of time means the simultaneous juxtaposition of different times, this room manifests a simultaneous juxtaposition of moments, thus transporting the reader to different plots and times that coexist spatially. It helps the reader to receive the textualized version of history, as it embraces documents, archives, videos, and reports that are associated with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Branch displays to the reader that history is relative and that nobody can reach a historical truth. Thus, considering that such a reading is less trodden, this paper discusses how Branch's room of theories is an outlet to other different times: the conspirators’ time and Oswald’s biographical time, which makes the historigographic time in this novel seem more spatial. Keywords: Spatialization, historiographic time, Libra, Don DeLillo, present, and the room of theories.

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Section: The Multiplicity Of Times Inside the Room Of Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading History across Space: The Room of Theories as a Web of Multiple Times in Don DeLillo’s Libra

2022

JJMLL

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Byproduct Temporalities: Nuclear Waste in Don Delillo’s Underworld and Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard

Lane

2020

Russian Literature

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Writing the Self and the Sixties

Gelfant¹

2001

Prosp.

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I Lived Through the sixties and in certain ways could be considered typical of the times, or at least of women of my class and calling. I might even seem to some an emblematic person worthy, perhaps, of notice. But I belong among the millions elided from the historical records of their time, their lives unnoted and unremembered. I wonder now why I could not have done what Joan Didion did to make herself memorable. Like her, I might have picked out people who seemed, so she said, “emblematic” – Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Linda Kasabian at the Manson trial – and by writing about them I could conceivably have written my self into history. For clearly, Didion intended to inscribe herselfinto the record of the sixties by describing people she went tosee. “I went to see …,” she would write, and again: “I went to see.” She wanted to see symptoms of cultural decline, especially those connected to violence, and wherever she looked, with her selective and impounding gaze, she found what she sought – the disarray that confirmed her vision of a world “devoid of any logic” in which, as she (and Yeats) said, things fall apart. She wrote of social disorder in a stark elliptical style, her insistent parataxis representing the lack of connection that was her theme. The reportorial mode she adopted suited her intent, for personal journalism, which melded the topical with the autobiographical, allowed her to impress her self, as well as her nihilistic vision, upon the reader's consciousness. ‘I want you to know, as you read me,’ she wrote, “precisely who I am and where I am, and what is on my mind” (“In the Islands,”White Album, 133).

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History, Biography, and Narrative in Don DeLillo's Libra

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Reading History across Space: The Room of Theories as a Web of Multiple Times in Don DeLillo’s Libra

Reading History across Space: The Room of Theories as a Web of Multiple Times in Don DeLillo’s Libra

Byproduct Temporalities: Nuclear Waste in Don Delillo’s Underworld and Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard

Writing the Self and the Sixties

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