0000000000584100
AUTHOR
Olena Moskalenko
“Hyperethnicity” and Ethnic Scenarios in White Noise by Don DeLillo
The present article aims at analyzing the reshaping of the Italian American cultural heritage in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Drawing on the concept of hyperreality as construed by Jean Baudrillard, the notion of hyperethnicity proves to be an efficient tool for a thorough exam of the transformation of the crucial Italian American topoi — i.e, ethnic signifiers such as the conception of the family, the theme of the household, and the concept of serietà — in the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo. Analyzing the signs of italianità in novels by Don DeLillo, Fred Gardaphé hypothesizes that the writer enacts a “masquerade” of his cultural identity, encoding in this manner ethnic “traces” into his o…
The Subtle Residual: Baroque Echoes in The Scarlet Letter
The following essay analyzes a significant Baroque substrata underlying The Scarlet Letter, taken up, among other things, in relation to the momentous Puritan legacy that is an essential element of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary work. In particular, the paper focuses on analyzing crucial and minor Baroque topoi represented in the novel, such as metamorphosis, relativism and ambivalence of reality, anxiety and the obsession with death. Furthermore, the article investigates the role of sharp chromatism within The Scarlet Letter, the use of typical Baroque symbols, such as the ellipse and the maze, and the fundamental role of distinctive Baroque tropes, that is, metaphor and antithesis. In ord…