Shattering the Illusion: Self-Preservation, Reality, and Meaning through Images in White Noise and "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"

Abstract

Finding a common language to address a poem and a novel is a challenging task, but taking on such challenges  forces us to stretch our exegetical ingenuity and often brings unexpectedly suggestive results. That is definitely the case with Devon Coutts‘s paper, which takes on two canonical postmodern works, Don DeLillo‘s White Noise and John Ashbery‘s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” – works that have often been discussed, but never, to my knowledge, together. The pairing may seem an unusual one, but Mr. Coutts shows impressive creativity in developing the ways in which both poem and novel reflect and respond to “the parcelling of culture and the effect of meaninglessness on contemporary America.”

Dr. David Evans