F123.
A Tribute to Don DeLillo: A Literary Vandal and Bad Citizen
Friday, February 9, 2024
9:00 am to 10:15 am
A master storyteller, Don DeLillo has engaged American culture with prescience, writing about terrorism, white men with guns, a culture saturated by images and capitalism, and the necessity of the artist on the margins. Despite critics who complain that he is “woefully influential” (James Wood) or guilty of “literary vandalism and bad citizenship” (George Will), the panel will interrogate how DeLillo’s novels perform cultural critique and what we can learn from his craft as teachers and writers.
Participants
Michael James Rizza is the author of the novel Cartilage and Skin and a monograph about Jameson, Baudrillard, and Foucault, along with various works of short fiction and academic articles. He is an associate professor of creative writing and the department chair at Eastern New Mexico University.
Ted Pelton has authored five fiction titles, numerous articles and reviews, and over fifty published stories, including in BOMB and Brooklyn Rail. He is a professor of English at Tennessee Tech University specializing in fiction writing, the novel, and American and world literatures.
John Domini has eleven books in print, including novels, short stories, a 2021 memoir, and an earlier selection of criticism. He's written extensively on contemporary fiction for Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. Awards include an NEA; he has taught at Harvard and elsewhere.
Rebecca Bernard
