White Noise: Text and Criticism (Viking Critical Library)

Great 80's postmodern book jumping around plots with a Fight Club philosophy on consumerism, sex, religion, and death, (before Tyler was ever thought up). Jack Gladney journeys through the story extremely fearing his own death and fearing to be exposed while giving lectures on Hitler, but Hitler represents death beyond a scale. Now they must escape The Toxic Event. His wife invents a drug to deal with chronic fear, but it has a strange side effect. His phrasing of descriptions and commentary is brilliant. I felt the anxiety build as I devoured the last pages.

This book has a lot to offer when read critically. As an English major at MSU, I had three classes in which this book was a required text. The additional essays in this version were insightful and quite useful as well.

DeLillo is a fantastic writer and this is a solid work.

I saw the movie and now trying to read the book. The only difference I can tell is there book includes more detail, but I really enjoyed the movie.

One of my favorite books. Recommend to all.

have recently finished White Noise by Don Delillo. I was enthralled by this book; living it word by exact word. And yet, it flowed nicely. It was a comparatively easy read (as opposed to V.) that never bored me.In spite of this book being written before the World Wide Web, which has only added to the swarm, the book's main focus is the topic of the information that we are bombarded with as we live our modern lives. From the narrator to his current wife and the children (his own and those brought in by marriage), we see the constant absorption of needless information; information that is derived from other people's panic, fears, superstition that when received is processed as matter-of-fact, almost apathetically. As it is shared it is passed along like gossip only to be argued against, mutated, and disenfranchised. This happens day-to-day within the narrator's family.And then the Airborne Toxic Event (a very specific name for a very specific disasters whose cause and effects are very unspecific) occurs and the molestation and noise of information (founded and unfounded, though it is nearly impossible to decipher which is which) grows considerably as evacuation procedures are made. It is not exactly chaotic. Much more this is a group of people who live in a small college town who are addicted to the events seen and heard through television and radios: they have seen all the disasters of the world, thus the only new thing is that it is happening to them.After the Airborne Toxic Event, the exploration of death takes place and is pondered on immensely by the lead character. In the end, a singular philosophy takes place: Are you the dier or the killer? (And yes, that is how "dier" is spelled in the novel.) And in spite of this singularity of thought, this "theory" of how we live as humans in this society, the narrator defeats it. He is neither dier nor killer: he just is.I think the one aspect that I can draw from reading this is how prone we are to misinformation; and how we create our own tabloid within all that we witness and hear.PS: This book is NOT a reader's guide. In the appendixes are a series of essays and observations made by critics and the like. This is not a reader's guide.

In "White Noise" DeLillo proves himself to be the Balzac of the contemporary era, particularly that of america suburbia. Very basically it portrays the negative effects of technology on our society. Overwhelmed by information, we become anesthesized to our environment....we must filter out some the data that bombards our system, and indeed we filter out most of it. Our systems so burdened by the information that we treat all things with indifference....except for our own death, which remains the one thing we would like to filter out of our consciousness but dont seem able to do so.Now, this all recalls the dry writings of Heidegger or Baudrillard, but instead DeLillo will have you laughing til you cry with certain passages. We have a Professor who is head of the "Hitler Studies" department (one thing about information overload is that people specialize in minutiae). His colleague, Murray, who philosophizes over food labels, wants to start an "Elvis Studies" department.The concept of the "hyperreal" is evoked. For example, there is a tourist site near the college. It has no other appeal than the fact that it is the "most photographed barn" in America. Throughout the book we see the characters, just like many of us, concentrate on image rather than substance.I have noticed that there is a review below by a man that claims that neither he nor his "brilliant" wife the engineer found anything of interest in "White Noise". I, too, am an engineer and know, by the way, that most engineers find themselves (often victims of self-deception) "brilliant". I speculate that the reason they could not understand this book is that they are too submerged in the "white noise" world of consumerism and information. In addition to that many engineers are afraid to address the issue of the dark side of technology.

What more can I say? This is one of the finest examples of postmodern literature from Dellilo or any other writer. I recommend this book to students all the time--either for writers to learn from a living master or lit. students who want a brilliant take on the modern condition. It slices right to the banal heart of contemporary culture and manages to be hilarious and haunting at the same time. The critical essays are just a bonus. Most of them exceptionally well written and insightful. A great and important book.