People everywhere are absorbed in conversation. [...] Conversation is life, language is the deepest being. We see the patterns repeat, the gestures drive the words. It is the sound and picture of humans communicating. [...] Every conversation is a shared narrative, a thing that surges forward, too dense to allow space for the unspoken, the sterile. The talk is unconditional, the participants drawn in completely. -- Don DeLillo, The Names (1982)

Calls for Papers

Call for Topics for future Don DeLillo Society panels.

To all Don DeLillo Society members: Have you an idea for a panel at a conference? Would you be interested in organizing the panel? If your answer to either of these questions is "yes," post your idea to the listserv (available to members only) or send it to us: Mark Osteen (Pres.), Joseph Conte (Treasurer), Jeremy Green (Newsletter Ed.), Marni Gauthier (Secretary), Philip Nel (Webmaster).

Sponsored by the Don DeLillo Society. 

Conference Sessions & Meetings

American Literature Association, Cambridge, Mass., May 26-29. 2005.

Mapping DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (Abstract due Jan. 15, 2005)

Despite garnering some of his worst reviews in years, Don DeLillo’s pointed parable of capitalism gone wrong manifests again the mordant wit and chiseled style that typifies his earlier novels, and demonstrates his continued fascination with the themes that have marked his award-winning career—the dangerous lure of technology and systems of perfectibility; the quest for spiritual meaning; a fixation on ascetic and quasi-ascetic outsiders; the ineluctable pull of the body—as well as a new concern with the effects of globalization.

For a panel to be sponsored by the Don DeLillo Society at this year’s American Literature Conference, please send 250-word proposals that explore these or other topics in Cosmopolis by January 15, 2005 to Mark Osteen (mosteen@loyola.edu), English Dept., Loyola College, 4501 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21210. Do NOT send full papers.

Sponsored by the Don DeLillo Society. 

Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture Conference, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, February 24-26, 2005.

Don DeLillo and the Uses of the Past

The Don DeLillo Society invites 250 word proposals and abstracts addressing the historical dimensions and contexts of DeLillo's fiction. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• postmodernism and history
• the cultural work of DeLillo's historical fiction(s)
• history and "truth-telling"
• cultural memory and forgetting
• nostalgia
• ideology and/or historicity in DeLillo
• DeLillo's (de)mystification and/or (de)mythologization of history
• DeLillo and the historical novel form
• narrative form and historiography
• history and "the spectacle"
• the fetish and the collection
• DeLillo and literary history
• DeLillo's treatment of a particular historical epoch or decade (e.g., the 1950s, the 1960s . . . )

Please email abstracts by September 10 2004 to Jeremy Green (jg@colorado.edu) and Marni Gauthier (gauthierm@cortland.edu).

Sponsored by the Don DeLillo Society. 

New and Forthcoming Publications

New:

DiPietro, Thomas, ed. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005.

Forthcoming:

Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibiity of Fiction. Routledge, 2006.

Engles, Tim, and John N. Duvall. Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise. New York: Modern Language Association, 2006.