Technology and/of Tragedy in Don DeLillo’s Plays

Authors

KAČER Tomáš

Year of publication 2025
Type Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
Citation
Description Don DeLillo is a celebrated novelist and an author of several plays for the theater. His dramatic oeuvre has become a center of focus recently (for example, Rey 2023). The topics of his plays often overlap with his focus in the novels. He is a sharp analyst (and critic) of the post-modern condition in the American post-industrial, consumerist society, which has been dominated by visual images as labels. An inability of his protagonists to achieve firm grounds in the complexities of manipulations and assumed identities is a common denominator for his stories. With references to various postmodernist critics (McLuhan, Postman, and others) and a view of the development in the post-COVID world of stay-at-home economy, VOD cultural platforms, and social media identity practices, the paper will investigate DeLillo’s plays such as Valparaiso (1999) in order to see them as tragedies of technological tales.
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