Writing Activities to Aid Critical Thinking about Prose Fiction

In ENG 102: Effective Writing II, I have introduced one of two activities that I have planned to promote my students' critical interpretation of White Noise by Don DeLillo. I asked them to imagine themselves making a movie based on the book--to cast the movie, to decide whether to set it in the 1980s or give it a contemporary setting, to envision the town, the college, and the Gladneys' home; and to select 2-3 chapters to make into scenes in the movie, imagining camera angles, dialogue, and visual images to convey symbols and themes. Students are working on the project in small groups.
My goals for this assignment are to encourage students to visualize the characters and setting; to select particularly significant plot points; to identify symbols and themes; and to become more involved with the text. It is my hope that the attention they bring to seeing the characters and the events of the novel, and endowing them with significance in the imagined movie, will help them read the rest of the novel more critically and write analytically about the novel. If such is not the case, at least I know they've been having fun today.
The other activity that I hope to incorporate either over the weekend or early next week is an imitation exercise. I am interested in having students "try on" DeLillo's style, with the goal of focusing their attention on his style and on stylistic options available to them. For this I've chosen a passage on shopping in a mall, an experience that we all have had. DeLillo names and briefly describes the mall and does his typical listing--of the foods they purchase, the smells, the products, synonyms ("gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh"). I ask students to follow DeLillo's sentence and paragraph structure as much as possible, using details from their own shopping experiences.
I am quite sure this writing exercise will generate less enthusiasm than the movie-making activity is generating, but I am confident that it will help them identify their experiences with his and I hope it will help them see their own experiences through the eyes of his narrator. I also want to use this as a route into discussing why it is that DeLillo does so much listing of things.