'Toyota Celica / A long moment passed before I realized that that was the name of a car... The expression was beautiful and mysterious, golden with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky.'Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The twentieth century was characterized by a shift in aesthetics in which craftsmanship is largely replaced by concept. The advances of Futurism, Surrealism, and Dadaism had all moved the appreciation of art away from the Platonic vision that dominated such a broad span of Western culture. Plato's hierarchy of Forms, in which the beautiful indicates the good, has largely given way to the use of the prosaic, allowing artistic meaning to the crude and manufactured. The liturgical connotations linked to DeLillo's expression “Toyota Celica” communicate this change. Its juxtaposition is explicit and gives the brand and the mass product an almost religious meaning. As Fredric Jameson points out, this correlation between the sublime and the beautiful, between “high culture” and “mass or commercial” culture has dominated the expansion of postmodernism. However, what makes De Lillo's passage so intriguing is not the suggestion that the "bass" can function as an artistic subject, but that it can take on its own status and aesthetic value. Central to this understanding is the notion of reinvention of previous models. DeLillo's novel is characterized by the montage of previously created material that provokes a questioning of originality and indicates that the art of rearranging can contain just as clear an aesthetic potential as the original creation. In The Precision of Simulacra Jean Baudrillard lays out a vision of American culture based on this notion of reshaping previous material. His gaze is critical and indicates a lack of originality in twentieth-century culture. For Baudrillard, Disneyland constitutes a paradigm of postmodern culture with its assemblage of disconnected media products and ghosts and points to a kind of gross recycling as "the first great toxic waste product of our time." This notion of cultural rejection is related to the “sense of the end of this or that” that Jameson posits as defining characteristics of postmodernism. The 'end of art', the 'end of ideology' (Jameson p1) and the dissolution of social class add to the sense of cultural exhaustion and blocked creativity. White Noise by DeLillo is characterized by such 'recycled' material. The novel reaches its climax when its protagonist Jack Gladney succumbs to his obsessive fear of death and ironically attempts to kill the man who forced Jack's wife to sleep with him. In narrative terms, DeLillo's plot appears weak. References to mental instability pervade the novel as DeLillo clearly reveals his character's fascination with the town's "insane asylum" (p4) through his frequent allusions to its "ornate" architectural style. DeLillo's narrative signifiers are clear; its protagonist is an intellectually dissatisfied and overweight university professor, with an incurable fear of death and a toxic "Nyodene D" (p173) in his blood. That he should fall prey to mental disintegration seems natural to the reader. The coherence of DeLillo's narrative pattern is compounded when Jack's father-in-law provides him with a gun. The marked intention with which the "small dark object" (p290) is handed to him clearly indicates the path that the narrative will take with a clarity similar to a dramatic prefiguration. However, DeLillo isaware of the predictability of its plot. Following up this exchange with the rhetorical "Was he Death's dark messenger after all?" (p291) constructs a conscious cliché. The "messenger" of a personified "Death" is a trope that pervades such a wide range of stories that it has become a narrative stereotype. By including it in his text, DeLillo presupposes his readers' exposure to this tradition and points to a key element for understanding his novel; namely that and is driven by recognizable stereotypes. Remarkably, the key stages of narrative progression display the same linguistic signifiers of genre that make up so many popular thrillers and cheap reads as Jack is driven to mental instability and attempted murder by the factors surrounding him. The novel is therefore a parody; it relies on previous models for its creation. This is surprising as the linguistic signifiers of the narrative depend on the reader's awareness of previous plot patterns; in line with the conventions of Baudrillard's postmodernist culture, DeLillo constructed his own form of literary "recycling." Jameson's The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism defines "postmodernism" as a "cultural dominant"; a conception that allows for the recognition of its presence within culture rather than confining it to a unified style or historical period. From this perspective, postmodernism is as present in marketing and production as it is in literature and art. The models from which DeLillo draws his novel are based on this commercial expanse. Its imagery revolves around materialism and is brought into fluorescent clarity by roadside motels and gaudy advertising. In the novel's climactic scene, DeLillo's language is cinematic, moving from the present moment to his protagonist's imagination with the ease of edited film. The passage is artificially lit by a television screen, constructing an image in which objects in the room "began to glow..." (p355) and take on a new shape. Here DeLillo's names both present a clear visual framework and allow Jack's imagination to take visual form. The "unmade bed" is imbued with new meaning as he is led to dwell on his wife's affair; “Did she carry him around the room while she sat on the bed taking pills?… They made the bed spin with their lovemaking, a foam of pillows and sheets on the little spinning wheels.” (p355) The image created by DeLillo's verbs is a burlesque amplification. Overseen by "The TV floating in the air in its metal stand" (p351) with the dirty shower just out of frame, the scene has all the hallmarks of a "B grade" American film or pornographic film . What is striking here is that, as with his narrative structure, DeLillo is not simply initiating a form of "recycling," but has absorbed the "toxic waste" of consumer culture into the form of the novel. This creates a strange situation in which signs that typically refer to what Jameson defines as “mass or commercial culture” (Jameson p2) become an integral part of the creation of “high culture” as the crude and the pornographic are absorbed into the canon of culture. contemporary literature. DeLillo's choice of model is significant as it allows for bathetic artistic meaning. It seems coherent here to bring our attention back to the seeds of postmodernism within the questioning of the artistic subject provoked by the works of the American Dadaists. The vulgarity of DeLillo's motel scene denotes a reinvention of the subject similar to that of Marcel Duchamp's infamous "ready-made" Le Fountain. The parody ofDeLillo's form, his use of economic motifs and the filmic quality of his narrative add to the idea of ​​a reuse of previously made material. Surprisingly, in their Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme, Andre Breton and Paul Eluard define the 'readymade' as "an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the simple choice of an artist". This definition is interesting in several respects. First, it allows for the artistic recognition of the “ordinary” made evident by Duchamp. However, it also serves to further bridge the gap between artist and craftsman. If, as Breton and Eluard suggest, an object is given the status of “art” by the will of the artist, the artist is redefined as a conceptual creator rather than a conceptual creator.artisan. Therefore, artistic merit is defined by ideology and concept rather than skill. Using models of popular culture and media production, DeLillo makes use of what has been previously created or “readymade”. Paradoxically, then, the predictability of its narrative construction serves to further the novel's merit as it comments on the functioning of literature as a whole. The concept of the readymade stimulates a discussion about the source of art and the merit of individual inspiration. Unlike the notion of an animating “breath” favored by the Romantics, the readymade requires a reconstruction of matter and not individual strength. This sense of metalepsis or combined allusion to previous models is embodied in DeLillo's setting. Jameson suggests that "changes in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible" within his architecture. In the opening chapter of White Noise, DeLillo's images conform to this interpretation as his range of nouns creates a postmodern collective rather than a particular genre or style. We are told that "in the city there are houses with turrets and two-story porches where people sit in the shade of ancient maples." There are Greek Revival and Gothic churches.' (p4) DeLillo's combination appears disjointed; an assemblage of styles removed from their original contexts. Not only does the novel's narrative style display a form of literary "recycling", but its subject is formed from a series of reshaped models. It is characteristic that the "madhouse" represents the lightest conglomerate with "... an elongated porch, ornamental dormer windows and a steep roof topped with a pineapple pinnacle." (p4) DeLillo's irony is clear. The building's architecture not only foreshadows the psychological confusion of its protagonist, but corresponds to the large-scale madness of a culture based on disjointed and perhaps exhausted models. However, it is unfair to suggest that the novel is defined by a lack of creativity. The very notion of reinvention denotes a level of innovation, indicating transformation as opposed to reuse. We are thus led to questions of originality and creative autonomy. This is an issue that has become increasingly central to attitudes towards university education and study over the last half century. In their exploration of plagiarism in academic writing Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber have set out a defense of plagiarism as a natural mode of expression within the "remix culture" of postmodernism in which the academic assemblage of borrowed material becomes a "valid form" of student writing." Here, Johnson-Eilola and Selber present reuse as a transformative practice. DeLillo's protagonist is a university professor whose academic focus is driven by the struggle to reinvent "Hitler" as an appropriate subject of study. DeLillo presents Jack with his statement that “I have"..