Abstract: In , Don DeLillo’s characters represent postmodern figurations of subjectivity and are defined by their continuous acts of performance and role-play. DeLillo depicts this mode of postmodern identity in his early play as a response to the end of authenticity and the mediatization of reality. At the same time, the play unfolds a discourse on the value and limitations of aesthetics to resist such cultural commodification. This essay suggests that the unusual interplay of postmodernism and absurdism in The Day Room expresses DeLillo’s ambivalent postmodernism and prefigures his contemporary concern with performance and subjectivity in the early twenty-first century.
Julia Rössler (Tue,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: