In the following essay, Maltby identifies Romantic qualities of the “visionary moment” in White Noise, The Names, and Libra, comparing those qualities to the critical consensus that characterizes DeLillo's works as quintessentially postmodern writing.

In the following essay, Moraru explores the ways DeLillo's novels thematize the contemporary production and reception of narrative art, focusing on readers' “negative” or “distorted” responses to the texts.

In the following essay, McClure examines novelist Don DeLillo's adaptation of popular novels of different genres, including science fiction, espionage, and occult adventures.

In the following excerpt from an essay on Don DeLillo's novel Great Jones Street, DeCurtis explores how the novel's main character—the rock star Bucky Wunderlick—his music, and the people with whom he associates reflect the dominant culture and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

[Nadeau is concerned with the linkage between revolutionary advances in physics in the twentieth century that have significantly altered the "scientific" view of the universe and themes, presentations, form, and content in the modern novel.] Not only are metaphysical assumptions … just as important and primary in the creative work of scientists as we have long known them to be in humanistic endeavors, [but also] the implications of new scientific theories … have often had unexpec...

While Thoreau was able to shape his months on Walden Pond into an instructive lesson for his future life, and into a ritual rebirth as critics have named it, DeLillo's characters are invariably left at the end of the novels still groping, or, at best, tentatively embarking on a course of possible rebirth but uncertain outcome. (p. 5) [DeLillo's] fifth novel, Players (1977), shares many of the major thematic and technical qualities of the first four, but in a most fundamental way it breaks the ...

Don DeLillo occupies a relatively sun-lit corner of that school of American writers who might be called Occultists—not because they deal with the supernatural (though some occasionally do) but because they see hidden correspondences between phenomena of the most heterogenous kind. Everything is in code; sometimes the code is to be compared, structurally, with other codes, all of them equally filled with, or devoid of, significance. John Barth's monumental Letters is a good example of the genre...

Author of two fine novels, Americana and Great Jones Street, and one dazzling novel, End Zone, Don DeLillo [in Ratner's Star] writes the American version of a European novel of ideas. Perhaps he most resembles Thomas Mann, lacking Mann's mysticism and long-windedness but sharing his remarkable ability to evoke and evaluate the ideas, language and attitudes of a wide range of intellectual disciplines. DeLillo also possesses an undercutting skepticism proper to the age of Beckett and Borges, an ...

Don DeLillo's first three books had the feel of novels straining to be something else, of energies out of their element, tadpoles in a cocoon. If what novelists did was to round characters, set scenes and plot consequences, DeLillo was willing, but he did not seem happy doing it. He seemed happiest when careening off into a detour. In "Americana" (1971), for instance, an executive at a TV network drops out of the rat race to drive cross country in pursuit of reality, America, himself. H...

Terrorism, one always assumed, springs from perverted idealism or protest overstepping rational bounds, and explodes under intolerable political pressures or its own heavy rhetoric. Recently, though, a third element has become discernible: Terrorism is now the stuff of diversion, merely another means of experimenting with "the uses of boredom." The phenomenon is explored in Don DeLillo's fine new novel, Players. Lyle, apparently the perfect young stockbroker, is competent, smooth, happi...

Plenitude and excess distinguish much of our best fiction: Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Coover's The Public Burning, Gaddis's JR, McElroy's Lookout Cartridge. Don DeLillo has their exhaustive impulse, but his six novels, singly and together, are a reversed cornucopia. They spiral from the overripe riches of America toward a difficult silence. More than any other novelist to emerge in [the '70s], Don DeLillo knows the spoiled goods of America and knows as well that a...

Don DeLillo seems determined to nail modern America down, and he may yet. His previous novels have tackled football ("End Zone"), pop music ("Great Jones Street"), and science ("Ratner's Star"), and in "Players" … he takes on terrorism. Terrorism of an attenuated, urbane sort; the book is really about sophistication, or at least nothing is as clear about it as the sophistication of the author, who combines a wearily thorough awareness of ...

Don DeLillo is insufficiently known, although his last novel [Players] got some media play. Like Shakespeare (how's that for a start?) he is seldom sufficiently serious; only End Zone displays his remarkable abilities with consistency. But he admirably refuses to repeat himself: after surveying America in Americana he considered a range of philosophic and ethical complements in End Zone, worked out a fantasy of drugs and rock in Great Jones Street, got into science fiction with Ratner's Star, ...