The "Saturated Self": Don DeLillo on the Problem of Rogue Capitalism

Varsava, Jerry A.

doi:10.1353/cli.2005.0017

Cited by 19 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

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“…The novel is a meditation on the profound cultural and mental revolution produced by the dominance of financial markets that has altered the way we conceive of fundamental human categories such as time and space. Since Jerry Varsava's ground‐breaking reading of the novel's dramatisation of the effects of rogue financial capitalist practices (), the text has been analysed, for instance, as a “satire on global capitalism's contradictory inclination towards both cosmopolitan worldliness and solipsism” (Chandler; , 241), or as a study in the contrast between “virtue and corruption…a Menippean satire…of both individual and political illness” (Valentino; , 141).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don Delillo's Fiction of Finance Capital

Marco

2014

Literature Compass

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Over the years, few scholars have focused on the centrality of finance capital and its workings within Don DeLillo's fiction. Indeed, not only does the world of finance capital serve as a background to the actions and the events of some of DeLillo's most famous novels (i.e. Players and Cosmopolis), but it plays a much more systematic and structural role in his entire oeuvre. The present article seeks to offer an overview of DeLillo's works as an expression and critique of the financialization of the US and world economy and to highlight the significance of finance capital as an interpretative paradigm for understanding DeLillo's fiction through the work of mourning and melancholia. The article wishes to contextualise such a materialist reading of DeLillo's oeuvre within a broader, but still very small, strand of 'DeLillian' scholarship, which recognises the novelist's preoccupation with the social and cultural effects of a predominantly financial era. Ultimately, this paper stresses that a financial reading of DeLillo's fiction does not only constitute a valuable contribution to DeLillo's scholarship, but that such an investigation of the relationship between literary fiction and economic, especially financial, regimes, can provide a significant insight into the long-term effects that the global ascent and crisis of finance capital over the last 40 years has had on the current US social and cultural condition.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don Delillo's Fiction of Finance Capital

Marco

2014

Literature Compass

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Geld und Geschlecht im U.S.-amerikanischen Gegenwartsroman: Beiträge zu einem kulturwissenschaftlichen Verständnis ökonomischer Dimensionen von Weiblichkeit und Männlichkeit

Boesenberg¹

2010

Gender and Economics

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The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo'sCosmopolis

Laist¹

2010

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

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Although it is set in April of 2000, Cosmopolis is Don DeLillo's first post-9/11 novel. DeLillo presents the novel's protagonist, Eric Packer, as a kind of third Twin Tower, a monolithic symbol of global economic hegemony. The commentaries on 9/11 by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio suggest a theoretical context for understanding the manner in which DeLillo portrays Eric's psychological collapse and the collapse of the World Trade Center as eerie analogues of one another, both indicating suicidal tendencies in the heart of homo technologicus.

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The "Saturated Self": Don DeLillo on the Problem of Rogue Capitalism

Cited by 19 publications

References 19 publications

Don Delillo's Fiction of Finance Capital

Don Delillo's Fiction of Finance Capital

Geld und Geschlecht im U.S.-amerikanischen Gegenwartsroman: Beiträge zu einem kulturwissenschaftlichen Verständnis ökonomischer Dimensionen von Weiblichkeit und Männlichkeit

The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo'sCosmopolis

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