Cosmopolis LIterary Conference - DeLillo: Riddled with Epiphanies

Information for “’Riddled with Epiphanies’: DeLillo, New York”

April 20-21, 2012

Presented by the College of Mount Saint Vincent & the DeLillo Society

6301 Riverdale Avenue   Riverdale (Bronx) New York 10471

2^nd International Literary Conference devoted to the work of  American author, Don DeLillo

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Calls for Papers:  http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/

Deadline for Paper/Panel Proposals Feb. 28, 2010

            “’Riddled with Epiphanies’: DeLillo, New York” is a conference based on conversation.  Presenters’ papers will be circulated amongst the participants and summarized during the conference itself.  We are looking to foster an atmosphere of intellectual play and a kind of collaborative inquiry long known to the sciences.  In foregoing the customary model of twenty-minute presentations, we hope to create a more lively atmosphere  which we hope will foster a fruitful dialogue about DeLillo’s work and inspire even more scholarship.  Thus, we encourage fully developed work on the author as well as more tentative projects.

The College of Mount Saint Vincent is especially beautiful in the spring, with its rolling- hills campus and flowering trees, sitting on a broad expanse of  the Hudson River.  It is located in the very northwest corner of the Bronx,  a short distance to DeLillo’s old neighborhood in the Bronx and very close to Manhattan and Yonkers as well. Accessible by all forms of public transportation as well as by car (right off the Henry Hudson Parkway), the Mount is a perfect venue for this event. 

 Festivities include a tour of “DeLillo, New York,” – Arthur Avenue to Great Jones Street – as well as a  staged reading of Love-Lies-Bleeding.

Please send a check or money order made out to the College of Mount Saint Vincent and send to Dr. Zubeck c/o the English Department.

$100  for presenters; $ 65 for guests and graduate students

For information, please contact Dr. Jacqueline Zubeck:

jackie.zubeck@mountsaintvincent.edu      718 405 3310

Proposal For The DeLillo Society Symposium on DeLillo

My main focus is on the character of Eric Packer who is seen a self-destructive loser who loses, gambles away, all his money in one day. I see him as realizing immediately after the conversation with Kinski in the limo, that his actions can prove her wrong. There being no outside to the demonstrators (as we are watching with OWS) they cannot accomplish any change because their opposition is necessary to the system. This is Foucault and the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge/capital in which all opposition is inherent in the founding Discourse. This is not to say that resistance is not necessary because it is. Very much so.

Baudrillard sees a way out in his Forget Foucault and that is to push the system to extremes (Nietzsche) and it will implode. Originally he had no hope of this until 9-11, when the hijackers in action, showed how: Giving the Gift that must be returned, the Counter-gift (not right away and it must be more so than the original gift  - "potlatch by Maas"). This is what Packer does. He pushes the global circulating currency trading market to its extremes by borrowing - on margin of course - all the yen there is that he can get his hands on. Of course all his shadows, watchers, stalkers, etc in the currency markets are following him, as he is Eric Packer. The yen is driven to its extreme high because of the tenet of the capitalistic market place of demand and price. The yen demand is so great that all other currencies collapse under its soaring price. (How many wheelbarrows of currency in Weimar Germany to buy a loaf of bread?) How many dollars to buy yen? So many the dollar becomes worthless as do all other currencies.

The modern money changers have been driven from the temple.

Packer begins the day in the dialectic, desiring balance not asymmetry. The global circulating speculative market "rises and sets with the sun" - Baudrillard - and like all planets and satelites has an asymmetrical orbit. As Benno tells him asymmetry was the key.

Reading Jesus through Isaiah, following his destiny, not the career choice of being the messiah, his last major action of overturning the tables of the money changers in the temple, was so outrageous that he could no longer be ignored. (He pushes the limit boundaries to excess.) His capture and death was desired. 

Since DeLillo was brought up Catholic, and has said he believes in the power of narrative transcendence - which Baudrillard and Foucault do not - DeLillo has made Kinski speak Baudrillardian thinking, and has made Packer throw the challenge in action to Baudrillard, who liked to think of himself as an "intellectual terrorist", and implode the currency market just because he could! We can say he felt an affinity with the demonstrators, because of Herbert Z's poem, and  wanted to lead them, etc. but that will put us back into hermeneutics which I avoid after studying Foucault and Sontag On Interpretation. 

I think DeLillo has created a political visionary for the post modern world we are living in. Our fast movement into simulation is dizzying. Total Simulated reality becomes Virtual Reality and from that there is no escape. Baudrillard is proposing the Order of Seduction to reverse our willing slide down the slope.  DeLillo has created Eric Packer to show us one way out. Genet and Burroughs have emphasized the power and responsibility of the writer in creating reality, and here IMO is where DeLillo is.

We have seen Margin Call and how that debacle was started. Interesting.