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Station #1 – Reality

Station #1 – Reality . Examine these passages (and any others you think fit the topic): the most photographed barn (12 – 13); Jack Gladney’s identity (16 – 17); Murray’s identity (20 – 21); Jack and Heinrich’s conversation (22 – 24); Heinrich on the brain (45 – 46).

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Station #1 – Reality

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  1. Station #1 – Reality • Examine these passages (and any others you think fit the topic): the most photographed barn (12 – 13); Jack Gladney’s identity (16 – 17); Murray’s identity (20 – 21); Jack and Heinrich’s conversation (22 – 24); Heinrich on the brain (45 – 46). • Gather salient quotes from the above passages. • What questions, anxieties, or theories is DeLillo proposing concerning the nature of reality? • Look up simulacrum/simulacra. What do various philosophers have to say about reality vs. representations of reality?

  2. Station #2 -- Supermarkets • Go to www.poets.org and read or listen to Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California.” • Look up and discuss vocabulary (penumbra) and allusions (Charon, Lethe). • What connections can you make between the poem and the grocery store scenes in White Noise (18, 20, 36)?

  3. Station #3 – Waves, Radiation & TV • Gather and examine as many passages as you can that include waves, radiation and/or TV. • What questions or ideas is DeLillo posing or proposing? • Write your own descriptive treatise on “the networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies” (46), “the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions” (51), the noise and silence of our technologies.

  4. Station #4 -- Death • Examine as many passages as you can that involve death (26, 37 – 38, etc.) and gather salient quotes. • Why this preoccupation/fascination? Is it morbid, despairing, curious … ? What are your attitudes toward death, and how do they compare with the characters’ contemplations? • Have you ever found yourself gripped or even entertained by disaster (see pages 64, 67)? What is it that compels us to gaze at calamity, misfortune, destruction, tragedy?

  5. Station #5 – Physical Self & World • Gather as many quotes as you can that involve sex, bodies and/or the environment. • In what respects are the characters uneasy? Comfortable? Aware? In denial? • What do you find to be burdensome or troubling about your body? Your mind? Your stuff/possessions? Your physical environments? • Are you more bothered by deprivation or accumulation? • What’s something you wish you could experience less intensely? What’s something you wish you could experience more intensely?

  6. “The American mystery deepens” (60). EXPLAIN

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