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

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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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  -