DELILLO’S BODY ARTIST, EGO DEATH – ART REBORN

Abstract

The Body Artist represents Don DeLillo’s partial venturing out of the topics of mass culture and media towards the representation of the individual. Although that might not seem to be the case at first glance, DeLillo continues to explore postmodern motifs, such as alienation, fluid identity and subjective time. Aside from that, the formal and thematic expression in The Body Artist is modernist as it is focused on “the individual at its core” – his/her rituals, suffering and inner life. This paper focuses on demonstrating the elements of formal changes in DeLillo’s oeuvre, as well as analysing the major motifs of his first modernist work – The Body Artist. The main motifs have been analysed in four segments – Postmodernism and the individual at its core, Postmodern treatment of time, Death of the ego and art reborn, and The art of (re)production.