Over the past forty years, from Americana to Point Omega, Don
DeLillo has written some of America's most important novels.
Although DeLillo scholarship has dealt extensively with critical
theory, through themes such as systems, technology, consumerism,
and terrorism, none has addressed the relation between his texts
and the concept of the outside. This study argues for a new model
of reading landscape in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century
American novel. The author takes as exemplary the novels of Don
DeLillo-and in particular the main focus of this study, The Body
Artist-which have constructed landscapes that exceed the limits of
geography, time, and perception. In relation to a series of
literary and philosophical texts, the author reads the force
driving this exceedance as the Outside, and he seeks to
reconceptualize "landscape of estrangement" primarily as a relation
to the Outside that animates and confuses the difference between
inside and outside. Thus, the project takes as a general guide the
following question: What does it mean to read the emergence of a
landscape that is of the Outside? The answer to this question will
help contextualize this study, bringing into relief a set of texts
not through the categories of "modern," "postmodern," or
"romantic," but rather their relation to the Outside. Thinking of
the book as an "assemblage with the outside" also means--within the
particular context of this study--that the author's concept
"landscape of estrangement" is not necessarily restricted to the
site of literature and can emerge via visual or auditory
landscapes. To extend this thought even further, a notion this
study suggests, but one that would require a whole other project,
is that America itself can be read as a landscape of estrangement.
If one were inclined to read novels as representations of America,
then one could argue that the landscapes found in those novels
would be representations of America's landscapes of estrangement.
For example, the landscapes found in DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis may
refer simultaneously to New York City and America at large. This,
however, is not what the author of this book has in mind. This
study argues that to think of America as a landscape of
estrangement would mean taking the novels produced within America
as elements-not representations-of that landscape, and as such they
would be available among other aspects, such as film, music,
politics, photography, and architecture. Sites through which
DeLillo's novels have been consistently read-the city, garbage,
technology, film, terrorism-all contribute to the emergence of a
landscape of estrangement within America. Perhaps literature and
film-or what the author will call "fabulation"-provide the most
profitable sites for reading this emergence given their potential
for narrative, which as we shall see is particularly suffused with
such landscapes. Taking its general philosophical, strategic, and
methodological inspiration from the works of Jacques Derrida,
Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Blanchot, this study
is an intervention into the growing field of DeLillo studies which
reads landscapes that problematize the limits of geography, time,
and perception. After developing the concept of landscape of
estrangement in contrast to more traditional understandings of
literary landscapes, the volume examines its production via the
outsider, hospitality, mourning, and the uncanny-sites whose force
comes from the outside. This book will be a welcome addition to
collections in American literature, critical theory, and
philosophy.
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