'Toyota Celica / A long time passed before I realized that it was the name of an automobile... The statement was beautiful and mysterious, golden with impending wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky. “Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The 20th century was characterized by a shift in aesthetics in which craftsmanship is largely replaced by concept. Advances in Futurism, Surrealism, and Dada all moved the appreciation of art away from the Platonic understanding that had dominated so much of Western culture. Plato's hierarchy of Forms, in which the beautiful indicates the good, has largely given way to the use of the prosaic, allowing artistic significance for the crude and the manufactured. The liturgical connotations attached to DeLillo’s “Toyota Celica” statement communicate this shift. Its juxtaposition is explicit, giving branded and mass-produced products an almost religious significance. As Fredric Jameson points out, this correlation between the sublime and the bathetic, between "high culture" and "mass or commercial" culture, dominated the expansion of post-modernism. However, what makes De Lillo's passage so intriguing is not the suggestion that the "low" can serve as a subject for art, but rather the fact that it can acquire its own status and aesthetic merit . At the heart of this understanding is the notion of reinvention of previous models. DeLillo's novel is characterized by its montage of previously created materials, provoking a questioning of originality and indicating that the art of rearrangement can hold as clear an aesthetic potential as the original creation. In The Precision of Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard presents a vision of American culture. based on this notion of remodeling previous material. His point of view is critical and demonstrates a lack of originality in 20th century culture. For Baudrillard, Disneyland forms a paradigm of postmodern culture with its assemblage of disjointed media products and fantasies and indicates a kind of gross recycling as "the first great toxic waste of our time." This notion of cultural refusal correlates with the "sense of the end of this or that" that Jameson sees as defining characteristics of post-modernism. The “end of art”, the “end of ideology” (Jameson p1) and the dissolution of social classes add to the feeling of cultural exhaustion and blocked creativity. White Noise from DeLillo is characterized by such “recycled” material. The novel reaches its climax when its protagonist Jack Gladney succumbs to his own obsessive fear of death and ironically attempts to murder the man who forced Jack's wife to sleep with him. In terms of storytelling, DeLillo's plot seems weak. References to mental instability permeate the novel as DeLillo clearly reveals his character's fascination with the city's "insane asylum" (p4) through his frequent allusions to its "ornate" architectural style. DeLillo’s narrative signifiers are clear; its protagonist is an intellectually dissatisfied and overweight university professor, with an incurable fear of death and the toxic "Nyodene D" (p173) in his blood. That he falls prey to mental disintegration seems natural to the reader. The coherence of DeLillo's narrative pattern is compounded when Jack's stepfather provides him with a gun. The marked purpose with which he is given the “small dark object” (p. 290) clearly indicates the path that the story will take with near lucidity.of dramatic foreshadowing. However, DeLillo is aware of the predictability of his plot. Following this exchange with the rhetoric “Was he the dark messenger of death after all?” » (p. 291), he constructs a conscious cliché. The "messenger" of a personified "Death" is a trope that permeates such a wide range of stories that it has become a narrative stereotype. By including it in his text, DeLillo both assumes his readers' exposure to this tradition and indicates a key element in understanding his novel; namely that and is motivated by recognizable stereotypes. Surprisingly, the fundamental stages of narrative progression display the same linguistic genre signifiers that make up so many popular thrillers and cheap reads, as Jack is driven to mental instability and attempted murder by the factors that drive him surround. The novel is therefore a parody; it relies on ancient models for its creation. This is striking in that the linguistic signifiers of the narrative depend on the reader's awareness of prior plot patterns; in accordance with the conventions of Baudrillard's post-modernist culture, DeLillo constructed his own form of literary "recycling." Jameson's cultural logic of late capitalism defines "post-modernism" as a "cultural dominant"; a conception that allows its presence to be recognized across the breadth of culture rather than confining it to a unified style or historical period. From this point of view, postmodernism is as present in marketing and production as it is in literature and art. The models from which DeLillo draws his novel rely on this commercial scope. Its imagery revolves around materialism and is highlighted by its roadside motels and garish advertisements. In the novel's climactic scene, DeLillo's language is cinematic, alternating between the present moment and his protagonist's imaginings with the ease of an edited film. The passage is artificially lit by a television screen, constructing an image in which the objects in the room “began to glow…” (p355) and take on a new shape. Here, DeLillo's names both present a clear visual picture and allow Jack's imagination to take visual form. The “crumpled bed” takes on new meaning as he is led to dwell on his wife’s affair; "Did she roll him around the room while he was sitting on the bed popping pills?...Did they roll the bed with their antics, a foam of pillows and sheets above the little wheels on pivots." (p355) The image created by DeLillo's verbs is one of burlesque amplification. Monitored by "The TV floating in the air in its metal stand" (p. 351) with the filthy shower just out of frame, the scene has all the defining signifiers of an American film or a "Grade B" pornographic film. ". What is striking here is that, as with his narrative structure, DeLillo does not simply initiate a form of “recycling,” but has absorbed the “toxic waste” of consumer culture into the form of the novel. Thus, a strange situation is created in which signs that generally point to what Jameson defines as "mass or commercial culture" (Jameson p2) become part of the creation of "high culture" as the crude and the pornographic are absorbed into the canon of culture. contemporary literature. DeLillo's choice of model is significant in that it allows for a seaside artistic significance. It seems coherent here to bring our attention back to the seeds of post-modernism within the questions on the artistic subject provoked by theworks of the American Dadaists. The vulgarity of DeLillo's motel scene denotes a reinvention of the subject similar to that of Marcel Duchamp's famous "readymade" The Fountain. DeLillo's parody of form, his use of cheap motifs, and the cinematic quality of his narrative all add to the idea of ​​a reuse of previously made materials. Strikingly, in their Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, André Breton and Paul Eluard define the “ready-made” as “an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the simple choice of an artist”. This definition is interesting in several respects. First, it allows the artistic recognition of the “ordinary” highlighted by Duchamp. Yet it also serves to further bridge the gap between artist and craftsman. If, as Breton and Eluard suggest, an object is given the status of "art" according to the artist's wish, the artist is redefined as a conceptual creator rather than an artisan. Thus, artistic merit is defined by ideology and concept rather than skill. Using models of popular culture and media production, DeLillo draws on what has been previously created or the “ready-made.” Paradoxically, the predictability of its narrative construction reinforces the value of the novel insofar as it comments on the functioning of literature as a whole. The concept of the ready-made stimulates a questioning of the source of art and the merit of individual inspiration. Contrary to the notion of animated “breath” favored by the Romantics, the ready-made requires a reconstruction of matter and not an individual force. This feeling of metalepsis or allusion combined with earlier models is embodied in DeLillo's setting. Jameson suggests that “changes in aesthetic production are most visible” in his architecture. In the first chapter of White Noise, DeLillo's imagery conforms to this interpretation in that his range of names creates a postmodern collective rather than a particular genre or style. We are told: “There are houses in the city with turrets and two-story porches where people sit in the shade of century-old maple trees. There are Greek Revival and Gothic style churches. (p4) DeLillo's combination seems disjointed; an assemblage of styles removed from their original contexts. Not only does the novel's narrative style demonstrate a form of literary “recycling,” but its subject is formed from a set of remodeled models. It is characteristic that the “insane asylum” represents the lightest settlement with “…an elongated portico, ornamental dormer windows and a steeply sloping roof topped with a pineapple finial”. (p4) DeLillo’s irony is clear. The architecture of the building not only foreshadows the psychological confusion of its protagonist, it corresponds to the larger-scale madness of a culture based on disconnected and perhaps exhausted models. However, it is unfair to suggest that the novel is defined by a lack of creativity. The very notion of reinvention denotes a level of innovation, indicating transformation as opposed to reuse. Thus, we are led to address questions of originality and creative autonomy. This is an issue that has become increasingly important in attitudes toward education and college over the past half-century. In their exploration of plagiarism in academic writing, Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber presented a defense of plagiarism as a natural mode of expression within the "remix culture" of post-modernism in which the academic assembly of material borrowed becomes a “valid form”. of student writing. Here,.