"I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts"
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A confession that lands like a deadpan punchline: the great diagnostician of American noise admitting he spent college unconscious, then picked a major that sounds like it was invented by a brochure. DeLillo’s wit isn’t the flashy kind; it’s the quiet, corrosive kind that exposes how institutions launder aimlessness into credentials. “I slept for four years” is hyperbole with a shrug, a self-myth that undercuts the pious narrative of the writer as diligent prodigy. It’s also a sly way of claiming that his real education wasn’t in seminars but in absorption - of voices, ads, sports, TV, the ambient static that becomes the raw material of his novels.
The phrase “something called communication arts” is doing heavier cultural work than it looks. “Something called” signals distance, even mild contempt: a refusal to dignify the category. It’s DeLillo side-eyeing the mid-century university’s pivot toward soft, market-friendly disciplines, where “communication” becomes both a promise and a fog machine. The subtext is that language is already being professionalized, packaged, and sold - exactly the phenomenon his fiction keeps returning to, from White Noise onward.
Context matters: DeLillo comes out of a postwar America drunk on growth, branding, and mass media. The joke isn’t just personal laziness; it’s about a culture where seriousness is optional and identity can be assembled from vague labels. He turns that drift into an origin story: the writer as someone who learned, by not learning, how the system talks.
The phrase “something called communication arts” is doing heavier cultural work than it looks. “Something called” signals distance, even mild contempt: a refusal to dignify the category. It’s DeLillo side-eyeing the mid-century university’s pivot toward soft, market-friendly disciplines, where “communication” becomes both a promise and a fog machine. The subtext is that language is already being professionalized, packaged, and sold - exactly the phenomenon his fiction keeps returning to, from White Noise onward.
Context matters: DeLillo comes out of a postwar America drunk on growth, branding, and mass media. The joke isn’t just personal laziness; it’s about a culture where seriousness is optional and identity can be assembled from vague labels. He turns that drift into an origin story: the writer as someone who learned, by not learning, how the system talks.
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| Topic | Student |
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