Violence in Contemporary American Literature Lecture in Contemporary

Violence in Contemporary American Literature Lecture in Contemporary English Literatures University of Silesia Marcin Sarnek David Hammons, Injustice Case, 1970

Lecture 2 • Deus ex machina or thematic ingenuity? The Aeorema

Don De. Lillo Americana (1971) End Zone (1972) Great Jones Street (1973) Ratner's Star (1976) Players (1977) Running Dog (1978) Amazons (1980) (under pseudonym "Cleo Birdwell") The Names (1982) White Noise (1985) Libra (1988) Mao II (1991) Underworld (1997) The Body Artist (2001) Cosmopolis (2003) Falling Man (2007) Point Omega (2010)

De. Lillo's themes • • consumerism media and media saturation individual identity vs. group identity intellectuals, academia, artists in modern America • conspiracy, logic of the plot • violence

Don De. Lillo – White Noise (1985) • Jack Gladney • Babette • Heinrich, Steffie, Denise, Wilder • College-on-the-Hill • Hitler studies • Nyodene D • Dylar • Toxic Airborne Event • Willie Mink

Paul Auster • • • • • The Invention of Solitude (1982) Squeeze Play (1982) (Written under pseudonym Paul Benjamin) The New York Trilogy (1987) City of Glass (1985) Ghosts (1986) The Locked Room (1986) In the Country of Last Things (1987) Moon Palace (1989) The Music of Chance (1990) Leviathan (1992) Mr. Vertigo (1994) Timbuktu (1999) The Book of Illusions (2002) Oracle Night (2004) The Brooklyn Follies (2005) Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) Man in the Dark (2008) Invisible (2009) screenplays: • The Music of Chance (1993) • Smoke (1995) • Blue in the Face (1995) • Lulu on the Bridge (1998) • The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007)

Salman Rushdie Defense (1994) • Satanic Verses (1988) • Fatwa issued in 1989 by Khomeini • Hitoshi Igarashi - stabbed to death in 1991 • attempted assassinations on Turkish. Italian, and Norwegian translators or publishers • Sivas massacre – 1993 - 37 dead • a number of writers supporting Rushdie receive deaththreats, including Wole Soyinka

Paul Auster – New York Trilogy(1987) • New York Trilogy – The City of Glass (1985) – Ghosts (1986) – The Locked Room (1986)

Auster's obsessive themes • Intertextualities – – Edgar Allan Poe Walt Whitman Henry David Thoreau Nathaniel Hawthorhne • Fanshawe • "Wakefield" • • • Twisted identities, doppelgängers Coincidences "Storytelling", "Writing" and obsessive writers Solitude and ascethism Language, loss of language, mediation of language ALL THESE – FEATURES OF A "POSTMODERN AUTHOR"

Paul Auster – Ghosts (1986) – Blue, White, Black – Future Mrs. Blue – ex-future Mrs. Blue