Deconstructing the Logos: Don DeLillo's End Zone
The deconstructive ideas and operations of Jacques Derrida have found an amenable target in American experimental fiction of the last decade. Three recent books on postmodern fictionÂ—Allen Thiher's Words in Reflection, Charles Caramello's Silverless Mirrors, and Jerome Klinkowitz's The Self-Apparent WordÂ—provide Derrida-influenced readings of Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Gass, Pynchon, and those novelists, most of whom are associated with the Fiction Collective, that Klinkowitz introduced in his Literary Disruptions: Ron Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Walter Abish, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Steve Katz. Although the names of some new writersÂ—Kenneth Gangemi, Frederick Tuten, Stephen Dixon, Guy DavenportÂ—do surface in these three books, for the most part criticism repeats, covers the same texts with the same approach, a procedure at odds with Derrida's own methods. What I offer here is a Derridean