Tréguer, Florian
Towards the Image as Symptom: Don DeLillo and the Crisis of the Obvious
- 2001.
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Among the various concepts of image in DeLillo's fiction, this study investigates what it problematically defines as the evident image (in its industrial forms: photography, television, video). Its symptomatic qualities (impact, denotation, expressiveness) make it a sharp instrument for questioning the characters' dealings with signs and confronting them with their fascination for truer than life representations. On account of its essential elusiveness, it is also limitative: it upsets perceptual habits and destabilizes language insofar as it becomes incapable of grasping experience. To go beyond this stage of critical recognition, the character/viewer regularly attempts to deconstruct the image, isolate its element of obviousness, through compulsive manipulations (of which repeating, freezing and enlarging are three exemplary forms).