Schneck Peter Schneck & Schweighauser Philipp Schweighauser 
Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction [PDF ebook] 
Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo

In his novel Mao II, Don De Lillo lets his protagonist say, ‘Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness.’ De Lillo suggests that while the collective imagination of the past was guided by the creative order of narrative fictions, our contemporary fantasies and anxieties are directed by the endless narratives of war and terror relayed by the mass media. To take De Lillo’s literary reflections on media, terrorism, and literature seriously means to engage with the ethical implications of his media critique.This book departs from existing works on De Lillo not only through its focus on the function of literature as public discourse in culture, but also in its decidedly transatlantic perspective. Bringing together prominent De Lillo scholars in Europe and in the US, it is the first critical book on De Lillo to position his work in a transatlantic context.