Generations of meaning: The matrix of authority in Don DeLillo's "White Noise"

Since its appearance in 1985, Don DeLillo's novel White Noise has been regarded as the prototype of the postmodern novel---though not for style and form, but rather for content and theme. DeLillo's postmodern society is the site of dissipated "structures" of power and authority, the hyperreal realm of simulacrum. The narrator---J.A.K. (a.k.a. Jack) Gladney---cannot fathom this world of disseminated authority, where knowledge and power are continually generated behind what Michel Foucault calls "the great abstraction of exchange". My thesis suggests that Jack's struggle to cope in this society is complicated by his own, exaggerated subjectivity. He is, in the words of Leonard Wilcox, a quintessential "modernist". His plight therefore becomes a proxy battle for these two epics, the modern and postmodern.