Contemporary Literature (2012) - The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo's Point Omega

Details

• article: The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo's Point Omega
• author(s): David Cowart
• journal: Contemporary Literature (2012)
• issue: volume 53, issue 1, pages 31-50
• DOI: 10.1353/cli.2012.0009
• journal ISSN: 0010-7484
• publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, American literature, Chicago, Illinois, Criticism and interpretation, David Cowart, Douglas Gordon, Imperialism, James Stewart, Laura Mulvey, Literary criticism, MacGuffin, Mark Osteen, New York City, New York, Novelists, Paramount Pictures, Politics, Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), Rope (1948), San Francisco, California, Screen (1975) - Visual pleasure and narrative cinema, The Birds (1963), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Universal Studios, Works

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Abstract

Cowart focuses on cinematic ekphrasis in Don DeLillo's Point Omega, the second on the perennially vexed question of just how an artist can, without didacticism, incorporate political perceptions into work that they might render tendentious. Ultimately, he argues for a kind of astute ascesis in DeLillo's engagement with political themes. Though he foregrounds the spiritual crisis of an apologist for the Second Gulf War, DeLillo deflects problems of immediate political legitimacy toward larger, less topical questions of a civilization's decline. DeLillo perpends the prospect of an omega point for the American empire.