Dialectic of Enlightenment in Don DeLillo’s White Noise

Authors

  • David Kaloustian Bowie State University Author

Keywords:

DeLillo, White Noise, technology, totalitarianism, fascism, Frankfurt school, Horkheimer, Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, consumerism, culture industry

Abstract

Don Delillo’s novel White Noise (1985) addresses themes central to the Frankfurt school theorists, including the totalizing matrix of technology, consumerism, capitalism, and bureaucracy, labeled by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as “the culture industry” in their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). This paper delineates how the novel dramatizes the contention of Horkheimer and Adorno that Enlightenment betrays itself in an incipient totalitarianism and regression to the barbarism of domination.

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Published

2013-10-01

Issue

Vol. 32 No. 1 (2013)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2013 David Kaloustian

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Dialectic of Enlightenment in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. (2013). Humanities & Technology Review, 32(1), 29-61. https://hta.ac/ojs/htr/article/view/dialectic-enlightenment-white-noise