Professor Joseph Conte visits SUNY Fredonia

SUNY Fredonia was visited Thursday by Professor Joseph Conte from the University of Buffalo (UB). Conte delivered a lecture on post 9/11 literature with a focus on Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man.

Conte has taught at UB since 1988 and specializes in the area of postmodern fiction and theory. Conte is also a leading authority on post 9/11 literature. He has written an array of material on the subject including his most recent book titled Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction.

The event was hosted by SUNY Fredonia's Professor Birger Vanewesenbeeck. 10 years ago Vanwesenbeeck was a beginning graduate student in Conte's postmodern fiction seminar. Things came full circle Thursday as Conte appeared at Fredonia as a guest of Vanwesenbeeck

Conte's lecture was an excerpt from an essay he wrote which was recently published in Modern Fiction Studies. The essay was a 12,000 word analysis of post 9/11 literature with an in-depth interpretation of DeLillo's Falling Man.

The lecture began with an epigraph from Don DeLillo's Underworld. "I think of it as one, not two," Conte read. "Even though there are clearly two towers, it's a single entity isn't it? Very terrible thing but you have to look at it I think. Yes you have to look."

Falling Man is a story about Keith Neudecker, a 39-year-old lawyer who works in the World Trade Center. Neudecker, a survivor of the 9/11 attacks, must learn to cope with the effects of witnessing the towers collapse while attempting to reconstruct his relationship with his estranged wife Lianne.

"If one examines Don DeLillo's writings of the past 10 years," said Conte, "there emerges a dialectical critique of the transnational forces of global capitalism and fundamentalist terrorism that brought us to catastrophe."

 Conte spoke of the famous 9/11 Associated Press photograph which is referenced in the novel. The photo has been titled "The Falling Man" and depicts a man leaping to his death from the top of the North Tower. Conte touched on the novel's reference to the eerie similarity between "The Falling Man's" pose and that of the man depicted on "The Hanged Man" tarot card.

"'Falling Man' offers a counter-narrative in its three part recursive form and in the figure of 'The Falling Man' himself as an expression of not only despair but also of meditative suspension and reconciliation," said Conte.

Conte spoke to the crowd of approximately 60 people for an hour before concluding his lecture. "'Falling Man' asks that we gaze not only on unspeakable loss but that we also interpret the affective and symbolic value that it holds for all of us," Conte said in closing.

Following the lecture, SUNY Fredonia Professor Dustin Parsons led the crowd in a half hour question and answer session with Conte.