SECRET AGENCY: AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM IN OSWALD'S TALE AND LIBRA.
Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale and Don DeLillo's Libra are expressly political works. Oswald's bid for selfhood is a nuanced critique of individualism in American life. Mailer reads Oswald's crime as an Emersonian act of self-making--both audacious and peculiarly American. Libra's critique of Oswald...
| Publicado en: | Mailer Review Vol. 3; no. 1; pp. 133 - 173 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Norman Mailer Society
Fall2009
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| Sumario: | Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale and Don DeLillo's Libra are expressly political works. Oswald's bid for selfhood is a nuanced critique of individualism in American life. Mailer reads Oswald's crime as an Emersonian act of self-making--both audacious and peculiarly American. Libra's critique of Oswald is similarly inextricable from its critique of American culture. Mailer and Don DeLillo follow the trajectory of a seemingly unremarkable man who claims a role in history by killing the president of the United States. Unlike "empirical" accounts of the assassination, the narratives of Mailer and DeLillo posit for Oswald a culturally significant motive that is at once personal and expressly political: When Lee Harvey Oswald fires on Kennedy he doesn't just end the President's life, he begins his own. |
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