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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Secret Agency: American Individualism in Oswald's Tale and Libra: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Secret Agency: American Individualism in Oswald's Tale and Libra (view source)
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{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Secret Agency: American Individualism in ''Oswald's Tale'' and ''Libra''}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Secret Agency: American Individualism in ''Oswald's Tale'' and ''Libra''}} | ||
{{MR03}} | {{MR03}} | ||
{{byline|last=Balter|first=Barrie|abstract=Norman Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale'' and Don DeLillo’s ''Libra'' are expressly political works. Oswald’s bid for selfhood is a nuanced critique of individualism in American life. Mailer reads Oswald’s crime as an Emersonian act of self-making—both audacious and peculiarly American. ''Libra''’s critique of Oswald is similarly inextricable from its critique of American culture. Mailer and Don DeLillo follow the trajectory of a seemingly unremarkable man who claims a role in history by killing the president of the United States. Unlike “empirical” accounts of the assassination, the narratives of Mailer and DeLillo posit for Oswald a culturally significant motive that is at once personal and expressly political: When Lee Harvey Oswald fires on Kennedy he doesn’t just end the President’s life, he begins his own. |url=https://prmrl.us/mr03bal}} | {{byline|last=Balter|first=Barrie|abstract=Norman Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale'' and Don DeLillo’s ''Libra'' are expressly political works. Oswald’s bid for selfhood is a nuanced critique of individualism in American life. Mailer reads Oswald’s crime as an Emersonian act of self-making—both audacious and peculiarly American. ''Libra''’s critique of Oswald is similarly inextricable from its critique of American culture. Mailer and Don DeLillo follow the trajectory of a seemingly unremarkable man who claims a role in history by killing the president of the United States. Unlike “empirical” accounts of the assassination, the narratives of Mailer and DeLillo posit for Oswald a culturally significant motive that is at once personal and expressly political: When Lee Harvey Oswald fires on Kennedy he doesn’t just end the President’s life, he begins his own. |url=https://prmrl.us/mr03bal}} | ||