SOCIETYSPECTACLE

the Eye in Don DeLillo

Grant Maierhofer

forthcoming 27 March 2026

"I had, however, been awed by Writer’s novel, and by a more ambient sense of the artwork, which was reprinted on the cover, but wasn’t treated in the same way “24 Hour Psycho” is treated in Point Omega, e.g., or the “Baader-Meinhof” paintings of Gerhard Richter were treated in that short story—I thought this, at the time, and I’m writing this now in the interest of full disclosure, but in the interest of full disclosure I feel an anxiety that perhaps there are scenes in Mao II wherein the paintings are looked at precisely in this way, but noting the weird experience of reading something after you’ve finished with the book..."

Societyspectacle: the Eye in Don DeLillo is a prolonged critical engagement with the subject of sight, of looking, of the eye in a writer's work positively saturated with it. Analyzing the brunt of his material, Societyspectacle explores this notion of using such a lens to understand a writer's appeal and influence, and in doing so creates an exploration not only of DeLillo's output, but of reading itself, its afforded pleasures, and the role of the writer of such things in the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.

GRANT MAIERHOFER is the author of Traumnovelle, Maintenance Art, Ebb, Gag and others. He is the founding editor of Index Press, and a scholarly associate professor at Washington State University, where he is the faculty advisor for LandEscapes. He is presently at work on The Unfinished, a book about unfinished projects in writing, music, film and art.

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ISBN (print): 978-1-916541-24-5 ISBN (ebook): 978-1-916541-25-2