Chapter One INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Background
Don DeLillo is widely considered to be one of the most influential writers by contemporary American literary field, for he always makes a detailed description about American life in his works. As a fruitful and conspicuous writer, DeLillo varies the themes in his novels, ranging from chemical pollution and advertisement to political conspiracies terrorism and other present focuses. Among these themes, the major one is always about social issues in America. Even though he is very well-known, DeLillo seldom gets down to promote his status in the literature circles as well as to arouse public concern on his books. Therefore, people seldom pay much attention to him until his best-known work White Noise comes out.
As DeLillo’s representative novel, White Noise has aroused worldwide repercussions since it was published in 1985. It’s also retitled as The American Book of the Dead by Mark Osteen, who committed to exploring Don DeLillo’s novels specially. The characters’ living conditions in this novel reflect the quandaries of the people in postmodern society. Their infinite pursuit of affluence and modernization lead them to be lost in the identity of the objects and communities. The freedom that technological civilization brings to them is also accompanied by the repression and shackles on human body and mind. What’s worse, due to the fast development of advanced technology, they are facing serious environmental and ecological crisis. That’s why this fiction has attracted much attention of scholars both at home and abroad who commit themselves to studying it from different perspectives, such as ecological consciousness, consumptive values of postmodernist society, narrative techniques, etc. Postmodernist fictions can hardly interpret the validity of contents just depending on the single discourse rules, so they are inseparable from some specific media. The linguistic sign systems built by postmodernist writers exactly provide an appropriate approach to understand the literary works. White Noise, as a typical postmodernist fiction, is also filled with numerous signs, but few scholars try to explore it from semiotics perspective.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
A large number of signs bringing readers the illusion of being unable to understand their true meanings behind the text are collected in White Noise. The whole text is randomly inlaid with lots of signs or images, which are affected deeply by postmodern society. DeLillo resorting to these linguistic signs that belong to a self-referential system induces decoders (readers) to explore the signified meanings behind signs.
In a macro sense, this study aims to investigate the implied meanings of linguistic signs in postmodernist fictions based on semiotics theory in the hope of providing a new view to do researches on postmodernist fictions. In a micro sense, this study attempts to provide a semiotic understanding of diverse signs involved in a typical postmodernist fiction White Noise. Different types of signs are further fully explained by means of three levels of Morris’s semiotics. Consequently, a semiotic model is established to analyze postmodernist fictions exemplified by White Noise and this thesis tries to offer some valuable references for the subsequent researches.
With respect to the significance of this study, both theoretical and practical significance are mentioned here. On the level of theoretical perspective, what should be considered first are Morris’s semiotic theories. This study analyzes plenty of concrete linguistic signs in White Noise which play an essential role in concretizing the theory into a micro level. What matters most, it provides a more objective and scientific way to probe into the relationships between linguistic signs and the text itself. It is proved that by analyzing various signs in White Noise supplemented by Morris’s semiotics theory, three levels of typical meanings in the novel are concluded and the theory itself can also be refined during the process. Meanwhile, it offers readers a new way to understand literary works created in postmodern society.
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Chapter Two LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Relevant Studies of Semiotics
2.1.1 An Overview of Semiotics
Semiotics is an emerging discipline which dates back to the beginning of 20th century. It is generally defined as “a subject to systematically study on signs” (Cobley, 2010, p. 3). There are two origins of modern semiotics and the first one is set up by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), and the other one is initiated by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).
Ferdinand de Saussure first puts forward “semiology” in his masterpiece Course in General Linguistics. According to him, semiology is part of social psychology which can explain for why he used the Greek word semiology instead of semiotics. In fact, the both terms share the same meaning but with two different forms. Majority of the modern scholars including Peirce presently prefer to employ the term “semiotics”, and so does Morris. Saussure proposes that a language is used to express ideas by a system of signs (Saussure, 1972, p. 15). He recognizes the symbolic characteristics of language that initiates the coverage of semiotics. In his opinion, the sign is defined as “not a link between a thing and a name, but between a pattern includes a concept and a sound” (Saussure, 1972, p. 66). These are two core terms in Saussurean semiology that are the signifier and the signified. The former refers to the sound aspect and the latter refers to the concept of signs which coexist together and people can’t do any changes to one aspect without having an impact on the other aspect.
Peirce, an American scholar who is a contemporary of Saussure’s, is on behalf of another origin of modern semiotics. Different from Saussure’s ideas, he adopts a philosophical approach to do researches on semiotics. In his view, the sign is defined as “a sign is anything that represents something else, and it can be elucidated or understood by human beings for it has diverse meanings” (M.Y. Wang, 2004, p. 426). To put it in an easier way, each sign has three essential elements including “Media, Object and Interpretant.” This is the famous sign triangle among scholars. These triadic relations are put forward to supplement the traditional dualistic relations between the signifier and the signified (J.Z. Guo, 2000, pp. 109-111).
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2.2 Studies on Don DeLillo and His White Noise
2.2.1 Don DeLillo
Although American writer Don DeLillo (1936- ) has achieved less eminence in China by far than other foreign writers, his works has begun to draw much concern among scholars aboard since 1980s. However, different from his coetaneous writers like John Barth, Vonnegut Kurt, Thomas Pynchon, etc., the first novel Americana published in 1971 doesn’t pay off. Besides, he hasn’t been awarded any international glories until the White Noise was brought out in 1985. It is this book that makes him win the National Book Award and helps him win a place in American literature field. Unexpectedly, his following creations are awarded successively and never look back. In 1988, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize was granted to him for another classical novel Libra. In 1991, he received the “PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction” for the issue of Mao II. In 1997, his salable fiction Underworld successfully depicted American life in the latter half of 20th century, which impels him not only to get the William Dean Howells award, but also to get nominated for the third time to achieve the National Book Award. In 1999, he was the first one in America who received the Jerusalem Prize, which helps him carry moral status in literature world. In 2000, Underworld conduced to win the Howells Meal of American Academy of Arts and Letters again as his major contributions to American fictions in the past five years.
Up to the present, DeLillo has created 16 novels, some short stories and plays. The most well-known one is White Noise that has a great reputation on the world and has enormous influence among the researches of his works. After receiving a lot of laurels, DeLillo’s works have been valued by many foreign critics. And modern critics hold that he is one of the major figures of postmodernist literature. According to the “Don DeLillo Society1”, throughout all critics about his works, it’s not hard to find that foreign studies on DeLillo’s works can be divided into two phases and the time of creating White Noise should be taken as a divide.
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Chapter Three THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ........................... 19
3.1 Morris’s Semiotics in Literature ............................... 19
3.2 Five Elements of Signs in Morris’s Semiotics ...................... 20
3.3 Three Levels of Morris’s Semiotics ................ 22
Chapter Four MORRIS’S SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC SIGNS IN WHITE NOISE ................... 27
4.1 White Noise ........................ 27
4.2 Syntactic Level ........................ 28
Chapter Five CONCLUSION ............... 55
5.1 Major Findings ......................... 55
5.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Study .................. 56
Chapter Four MORRIS’S SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC SIGNS IN WHITE NOISE
4.1 White Noise
The novel White Noise is created at the background of a town called “Blacksmith”, and a “College-on-the-Hill” situated in the town sitting at the middle part of America. The main character Jack Gladney is a professor in the field of studying Hitler. Jack’s family life, his campus life in College-on-the-Hill and the daily life of local residents living in the town as well as their performance in a catastrophic event are all depicted in detail. All of these signs display the postmodern life of America vividly.
White Noise is composed of three parts “Waves and Radiation, The Airborne Toxic Event and Dylarama”. The first part reads like an excellent sitcom for it doesn’t have any fansinating and attractive plots compared with traditional novels. But each scene in the novel fully shows the absurdity and grotesque about postmodern social life of America. The second part describes the leakage of a kind of chemical waste called “Nyodene Derivative”, which arouses the extreme panic among the local people. People begin to suffer from the consequences of disasters caused by the development of postindustrial societies. In this Chapter, the author DeLillo sympathetically and sarcastically portrays people’s helpless and panicky reflection before disasters. Finally, the great escape, approximately lasting nine days, ends by an intervention of advanced technology. In the late 1900s, America is a postindustrial country with fast development and gradually becomes an alienated material world. But now, it begins to alienate the human being in reverse, and even threaten their living. Especially, they always feel puzzled by the fear of death. In the third part, Babette, behind her husband’s back, carries the sex trade with Mr. Gray who runs dylarama in a long-term period. After learning the truth, Jack plans to take revenge on him. Due to he is exposed to the airborne toxic event transitorily, he feels that the death is on the way. So, Jack also tries to obtain the medicine--dylarama to clear up the fear of death.
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Chapter Five CONCLUSION
5.1 Major Findings
reference(omitted)