Critics on White Noise and Moon Palace. On Classification and Genre
Summary
The starting point of my thesis is that literary critics classify Paul Auster's Moon Palace and Don Delillo's White Noise in quite different ways. Some of them point at clear postmodern traits, referring to postmodern authors and ideas. Other critics, however, refuse such postmodern connotations, and stress the American (literary) tradition or the link with systems theory. In order to investigate these diverging views, I first deal with the concept of genre, then I look at four theorists (Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard), and finally I deal with American approaches to literature (systems theory, Romanticism). I discuss the aforementioned theorists, and I look for traces of their theories in the two novels.