Logos Cowboys: Postmodern Football and Post-Postmodern War in Don DeLillo's End Zone and Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Subject Area
Film and Literary Studies
Abstract
In 1972, during the Vietnam War, Don DeLillo published End Zone, a postmodern novel about a football player at Logos College who fantasizes about nuclear war. In 2012, during the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, Ben Fountain published Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, a post-postmodern novel about a twenty-year-old war hero being celebrated during a Dallas Cowboys' football game. After comparing DeLillo's and Fountain's similar metaphors of football and war, the paper concludes that End Zone's Wittgensteinian, at times farcical, play with the language of football and the rhetorical truth of war ultimately contrasts with Billy Lynn's satire of sports patriotism and the unironic, decimating violence of war. Finally, the two novels represent two periodic stages of response to war: While DeLillo's postmodern literature values irony and play as an absurdist response to the political obfuscations of the Vietnam Era, Fountain's post-postmodern development counters the ideological spectacle of endless war with sincere disillusionment.
Brief Bio Note
Alex E. Blazer is an Associate Professor of English at Georgia College & State University, where he teaches contemporary American literature, film, and literary criticism. He has presented two conference papers at SECCLL—one on Bret Easton Ellis and one on The Dark Knight Trilogy. He has published articles on Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, and The Matrix Trilogy as well as a book on the relationship between contemporary American poetry and literary theory.
Keywords
DeLillo, Fountain, Football, War, Postmodernism, Post-postmodernism
Location
Room 218
Presentation Year
2015
Start Date
3-26-2015 1:30 PM
End Date
3-26-2015 2:45 PM
Embargo
5-23-2017
Recommended Citation
Blazer, Alex, "Logos Cowboys: Postmodern Football and Post-Postmodern War in Don DeLillo's End Zone and Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" (2015). South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL). 40.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/seccll/2015/2015/40
Logos Cowboys: Postmodern Football and Post-Postmodern War in Don DeLillo's End Zone and Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Room 218
In 1972, during the Vietnam War, Don DeLillo published End Zone, a postmodern novel about a football player at Logos College who fantasizes about nuclear war. In 2012, during the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, Ben Fountain published Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, a post-postmodern novel about a twenty-year-old war hero being celebrated during a Dallas Cowboys' football game. After comparing DeLillo's and Fountain's similar metaphors of football and war, the paper concludes that End Zone's Wittgensteinian, at times farcical, play with the language of football and the rhetorical truth of war ultimately contrasts with Billy Lynn's satire of sports patriotism and the unironic, decimating violence of war. Finally, the two novels represent two periodic stages of response to war: While DeLillo's postmodern literature values irony and play as an absurdist response to the political obfuscations of the Vietnam Era, Fountain's post-postmodern development counters the ideological spectacle of endless war with sincere disillusionment.
