Publications

DeLillo. Tropologías de la Postmodernidad

Paula Martín Salván

Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba

2009

Description

DeLillo. Tropologías de la Postmodernidad:

This book analyzes the narrative work of Don DeLillo (New York, 1936) in the context of his consideration as a Postmodernist author. The growing academic attention to his work in the last few years has generated a continuous debate about its place within the frame of contemporary literature. This justifies the need to review the terms of the debate, in order to propose a stable generic and historiographic location for his work. This text is born of the need to answer a question repeatedly asked by DeLillo’s critics: “Is DeLillo a postmodern writer or is he a pathologist of postmodernism?” (Lentricchia, ed. 1991a: 58; Osteen, 1996: 440).

My departure point is the idea that DeLillo’s works contribute to the definition of the socio-economic and political context in which they emerge, that they shape the postmodern reality in which they originate as cultural products. My reading of DeLillo’s novels looks for interpretative keys that may help to understand how these texts articulate the postmodern world from rhetorical and narrative perspectives. I focus on four figures television, conspiracy, waste and capital that are particularly recurrent in DeLillo’s fiction. Through their rhetorical function as tropes, they configure this author’s worldview, illustrating the sociological and epistemological patterns that make DeLillo a “pathologist of postmodernism”.