The Corporation and White Noise

White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, and is an example of postmodern literature. Widely considered his "breakout" work, the book won the National Book Award in 1985 and brought him to the attention of a much larger audience. Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The Corporation focuses its critique closely on the idea of "externalities," that is, the external often undesirable effects of business transactions between two parties (often two corporations) upon an un-consulted third party (often the surrounding community).

According to Jonathon the narrator, Jack Gladney, describes the annual arrival of station wagons at his college, College-on-the-Hill. He walks into his quiet town of Blacksmith, where he lives with his wife, Babette, and their four children by previous marriages infant Wilder, Denise, Steffie, and Heinrich. He is the chairman and inventor of Hitler studies at the college. The Corporation raises fundamental problems that cannot be answered by supporting corporate-funded candidates or parties (no matter what the film directors or screen credits may tell you), but only by building forms of independent, anti-corporate, political action on a growing, increasingly mass scale (www.metacritic.com). In Jastreboff view as the treatment of dissenters inside as well as outside the DNC last summer (not to mention the RNC) dramatized, such independent action is something that the Democratic establishment (not to mention the Republicans) seek to control and to co-opt, not create.

Jonathon views white Noise was published in 1985 to great critical acclaim; it won the National Book Award and, more importantly, opened up DeLillo's oeuvre to new readers. More than anything, it established DeLillo alongside Thomas Pynchon as one of the most important contemporary writers and a must-have on collegiate syllabi. In its early sequences, The Corporation examines how corporations acquired the status of legal "persons" following the US Civil War, ironically via the Constitutional amendments aimed at guaranteeing equal citizenship to newly freed African Americans (TheCorporation.com). Wittily, the film then charts the corporate "person's" behaviour using an authentic psychiatric checklist from World Health Organization: "Callous unconcern for the feelings of other?" As the evidence mounts, the damning diagnosis emerges: the corporation, examined as a "person," is a "psychopath."

DeLillo claims his main inspiration for Jack Gladney's obsessive fear of death was Ernest Becker's 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfictions work, The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues that man's attempt to deny the fact of his own death is his major impulse. Jastreboff thinks that while this idea could hold water in any period, DeLillo makes it all the more relevant by examining the "white noise" of modern death that lends the novel its title, the reminders of our death that lurk beneath our technological society.

More specifically, DeLillo explores the notion of simulacra (something that resembles something else or, in other words, simulations) in American society (www.metacritic.com). In 1983, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote Simulations. In it, he maintains that the postmodern world privileges simulacra over reality; we believe our ...