White Noise

DeLillo’s novel about Jack Gladney, a midwestern professor who founded the field of Hitler studies without learning German, and his family’s saturation in television, supermarkets, tabloid rumour and pharmaceutical hope. The middle section, “The Airborne Toxic Event,” puts a chemical spill over the town and turns the family’s ambient dread into an evacuation managed by a simulation agency that finds the real disaster useful practice. The book’s subject is the fear of death and the noise a consumer culture generates to drown it — the drug Dylar, which is supposed to remove the fear of dying, is the plot’s engine. It won the National Book Award and is the standard text for teaching American postmodern fiction.

Why it’s on the list: McCord lists it late in Literature and Societal Critique, after Wolfe and Girard and before Houellebecq — the run of entries reading contemporary novels as diagnoses of what mass culture does to attention and belief.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the Knowledge, Culture, and Society part, section Literature and Societal Critique — a structured curriculum shared on X on March 9, 2026 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Marked with a ☑️ on the source page. The page gives no legend for that mark, so it is recorded here literally and not interpreted.

Connections

• Consumerism — the culture the novel anatomises.
• Postmodernism — the movement the book is the standard American example of.
• Rhetoric — the novel’s recurring subject, the language institutions use to manage fear.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.