Proceedings of the 2022 3rd International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange(ICLACE 2022)

Embrace Death: A Review of Recalling Symbolic Order in White Noise

Authors
Tianyang Cui*
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1A4, Canada
Corresponding Author
Tianyang Cui
Available Online 14 July 2022.
DOI
10.2991/assehr.k.220706.035How to use a DOI?
Keywords
Death; Religion; Noise; Symbol
Abstract

In our times of the Covid-19 pandemic, death seems to slip away from the funeral and cemetery into our living space, dissolved in the air we breathe. In White Noise, Jack’s deathly fear of the economic order forces him to find an alternative solution in which noise plays the role of prophet, guiding him towards a new symbolic order. The novel chronicles Jack’s transformation of the concept of death and, in the end, partially takes him out of the order created by bourgeois reason. Based on Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death, death in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, this essay argues that the symbolic primitive order embraces death as a reversible component of the exchange of life, while the economic system rejects death and exaggerates the value of life as an accumulation. Death in this context serves as an illumination of the primitive symbolic order, a potential subversion of the political and economic order in the text.

Copyright
© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
Open Access
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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Volume Title
Proceedings of the 2022 3rd International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange(ICLACE 2022)
Series
Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research
Publication Date
14 July 2022
ISBN
978-94-6239-592-3
ISSN
2352-5398
DOI
10.2991/assehr.k.220706.035How to use a DOI?
Copyright
© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
Open Access
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

Cite this article

TY  - CONF
AU  - Tianyang Cui
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/07/14
TI  - Embrace Death: A Review of Recalling Symbolic Order in White Noise
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 3rd International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange(ICLACE 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 168
EP  - 172
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220706.035
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220706.035
ID  - Cui2022
ER  -