Fated Landscape: Choropoetic Practice in Don DeLillo's Underworld
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Chris Thurgar-Dawson
Abstract
Don DeLillo's millennial novel, Underworld, is not just about social, political or global systems as such, but equally about the processes of spatial organisation through which they are gathered. Indeed, Underworld uses an array of spatial practices to lend it an overall structure that is geographical as well as temporal and historical. This is not to reduce the significance of its fixed historical scenes or the order in which they occur, but to suggest that for contingent and writerly texts like Underworld, a reading via spatial parameters can prove ultimately more rewarding. Questioning Kavadlo's claim that “[t]he novel, however, seems less concerned with where we are than how we got here” (Kavadlo 2004, 122) I argue that six main practices are in evidence in the text and that these six socio-spatial modes, taken together, constitute a regional or ‘chorological’ poetics. The six spatial modes I am positing are: spatial production; spatial consumption; landscape; space-time; place; and gender.
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Literature and the New Cultural Geography
- America/Deserta: Postmodernism and the Poetics of Space
- Postcolonialism and the Politics of Space: Towards a Postcolonial Analysis of Material Spatial Practices
- Literature, Travel and Geography: French Orientations
- Writing English Landscape History
- Placing Stories, Performing Places: Spatiality in Joyce and Austen
- Der Rhein: Poetik des Stroms zwischen Elementarisierung und Domestikation
- The Poetics of Geography in English-Canadian Literature
- Fated Landscape: Choropoetic Practice in Don DeLillo's Underworld
- The Traps: Bukowski as Interpreter of Cornered Lives
- Alexander Onysko, Anglicisms in German: Borrowing, Lexical Productivity, and Written Codeswitching
- Sabine Fiedler, English Phraseology: A Coursebook
- A History of the English Language, ed. Richard Hogg & David Denison; The Oxford History of English, ed. Lynda Mugglestone
- The Celtic Englishes IV: The Interface between English and the Celtic Languages, ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram
- Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of the Venerable Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio
- Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553
- Sources of the Boece, ed. Tim William Machan with the assistance of A. J. Minnis
- The ‘Exhortation’ from Disce Mori. Edited from Oxford, Jesus College, MS 39, ed. E. A. Jones
- Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak
- Eingegangene Schriften
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Literature and the New Cultural Geography
- America/Deserta: Postmodernism and the Poetics of Space
- Postcolonialism and the Politics of Space: Towards a Postcolonial Analysis of Material Spatial Practices
- Literature, Travel and Geography: French Orientations
- Writing English Landscape History
- Placing Stories, Performing Places: Spatiality in Joyce and Austen
- Der Rhein: Poetik des Stroms zwischen Elementarisierung und Domestikation
- The Poetics of Geography in English-Canadian Literature
- Fated Landscape: Choropoetic Practice in Don DeLillo's Underworld
- The Traps: Bukowski as Interpreter of Cornered Lives
- Alexander Onysko, Anglicisms in German: Borrowing, Lexical Productivity, and Written Codeswitching
- Sabine Fiedler, English Phraseology: A Coursebook
- A History of the English Language, ed. Richard Hogg & David Denison; The Oxford History of English, ed. Lynda Mugglestone
- The Celtic Englishes IV: The Interface between English and the Celtic Languages, ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram
- Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of the Venerable Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio
- Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553
- Sources of the Boece, ed. Tim William Machan with the assistance of A. J. Minnis
- The ‘Exhortation’ from Disce Mori. Edited from Oxford, Jesus College, MS 39, ed. E. A. Jones
- Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak
- Eingegangene Schriften
