SOURCE: “Don DeLillo’s Postmodern Pastoral,” in Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment, edited by Michael P. Branch, Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic, University of Idaho Press, 1998, pp. 235–46.

In the following essay, Phillips characterizes White Noise as a “postmodern pastoral,” studying the novel's representation of the natural world in general and the rural American landscape in particular.

A decade after its publication, the contribution of Don DeLillo’s White Noise to our understanding of postmodern cultural conditions has been thoroughly examined by literary critics (see, for example, the two volumes of essays on DeLillo’s work edited by Frank Lentricchia). The novel has been mined for statements like “Talk is radio,” “Everything’s a car,” “Everything was on TV last night,” and “We are here to simulate”—statements that critics, attuned to our culture’s dependence on artifice and its...