"A Language not Quite of this World": Transcendence and Counter-Lingüistic Turns in Don Delillo's fiction.

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine Don DeLillo’s “visionary concern with language” (Weinstein 1993: 289). I will focus on conceptions about language specifically related to ideas of transcendence, epiphany and purity in DeLillo’s novels, and I will analyze the rhetorical patterns in which those conceptions are usually articulated. I will search for recurrent motifs that contribute to a discursive and rhetorical model for the analysis of DeLillo’s work and I will try to offer an interpretative frame that may throw some light on the literary and cultural ascendancy of DeLillo’s ideas about language, tentatively proposing that the rhetorical matrix from which he draws many of his articulations on language may be located in literary models from medieval mysticism, romanticism and modernism.