Reading Landscape in American Literature

Reading Landscape in American Literature - Tyler Kessel

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?