LITERATURE’S RESPONSE TO INFORMATION OVERLOAD IN DON DELILLO’S WHITE NOISE
LITERATURE’S RESPONSE TO INFORMATION OVERLOAD IN DON DELILLO’S WHITE NOISE

Summary/Abstract: Literature’s Response to Information Overload in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. The present article examines the novel White Noise through the intersecting theoretical frameworks of Paul Virilio’s dromology, and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacral theory, proposing that DeLillo constructs an epistemological model of modern life as mediated risk perception. Virilio’s theories on the acceleration of information flow frame the novel’s temporal anxiety, whilst Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality explains the characters’ dependence on simulated knowledge. Together, these frameworks reveal how DeLillo’s fiction translates abstract theoretical notions into lived experience, positioning narrative as both a mirror and critique of late modern consciousness. This paper argues that in White Noise, DeLillo transforms narrative fragmentation and sensory saturation—both formal strategies and moral critiques of late-capitalist modernity—into a distinctive literary aesthetics of excess. By examining how his style enacts a crisis of perception, the study demonstrates the impossibility of coherence in a hypermediated age, drawing on theoretical frameworks from Virilio and Baudrillard to illuminate the sociocultural stakes of perceptual excess.

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