{"title":"Astro-logic: Conspiracy as Compensation and the Palliative Paranoia of Don DeLillo's Libra","authors":"Timothy Lem-Smith","doi":"10.1353/arq.2023.a899702","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) is a fictionalization of the events leading up to the Kennedy assassination that considers the telos of conspiracy theory in a fictional context. DeLillo uses the Kennedy assassination to animate epistemological questions that both destabilize and seek to restore notions of agency, authority, intentionality and collectivity, using conspiracy theory as a kind of prismatic heuristic. DeLillo engages these various concepts under the sign of a conspiracy aesthetic, that is, an aesthetic that deploys the unverifiable precepts of conspiracy theory as if they were real. My treatment ultimately considers the political/ethical valences of fictional narratives that produce coherence out of the chaos of traumatic crisis-events in order to conceptualize how DeLillo's novel offers a reparative gesture that is, paradoxically, grounded in paranoia.","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"79 1","pages":"35 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Arizona Quarterly","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2023.a899702","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, AMERICAN","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) is a fictionalization of the events leading up to the Kennedy assassination that considers the telos of conspiracy theory in a fictional context. DeLillo uses the Kennedy assassination to animate epistemological questions that both destabilize and seek to restore notions of agency, authority, intentionality and collectivity, using conspiracy theory as a kind of prismatic heuristic. DeLillo engages these various concepts under the sign of a conspiracy aesthetic, that is, an aesthetic that deploys the unverifiable precepts of conspiracy theory as if they were real. My treatment ultimately considers the political/ethical valences of fictional narratives that produce coherence out of the chaos of traumatic crisis-events in order to conceptualize how DeLillo's novel offers a reparative gesture that is, paradoxically, grounded in paranoia.
期刊介绍：
Arizona Quarterly publishes scholarly essays on American literature, culture, and theory. It is our mission to subject these categories to debate, argument, interpretation, and contestation via critical readings of primary texts. We accept essays that are grounded in textual, formal, cultural, and theoretical examination of texts and situated with respect to current academic conversations whilst extending the boundaries thereof.
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