Peripheralizing DeLillo: Surplus Populations, Capitalist Crisis, and the Novel

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Peripheralizing DeLillo tracks the historical arc of Don DeLillos poetics as it recomposes itself across the genres of short fiction, romance, the historical novel, and the philosophical novel of time. Drawing on theories that capital, rather than the bourgeoisie, is the displaced subject of the novel, Thomas Travers investigates DeLillos representation of fully commodified social worlds and re-evaluates Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. Deploying an innovative re-periodisation, Travers considers the evolution of DeLillos aesthetic forms as they register and encode one of the crises of contemporary historicity: the secular dynamics through which a society organised around waged work tends towards conditions of under- and unemployment. Situating DeLillo within global histories of uneven and combined development, Travers explores how DeLillos treatment of capital and labour, affect and narration, reconfigures debates around realism and modernism. The DeLillo that emerges from this study is no longer an exemplary postmodern writer, but a composer of capitalist epics, a novelist drawn to peripheral zones of accumulation, zones of social death whose surplus populations his fiction strives to re-historicise, if not re-dialecticise as subjects of history.

Reviews

Providing us with a startling new reading of Don DeLillos oeuvre, from his very earliest short stories to his late minimalism, Thomas Travers book is, however, far more than simply a great study of one of the most important U.S. novelists of our time. It is also one of the most significant books on Marxist literary theory and on the contemporary novels responses to economic crisis, financialization and the dynamics of dispossession that has been published this century. A major advance in our understanding of the novels attempts to grapple with the challenges to representation posed by contemporary capitalism. * David Cunningham, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of Westminster, UK *
Answering some big questions about the postmodern hypothesis from the ground zero of its ruin, this book sets out to reinvent DeLillo as a novelist of the anonymously dispossessed masses whose multitude defines our historical present. The DeLillo that emerges from these pages is less the exemplar of postmodernism in fiction than he is a prophet of dissent, a prescient thinker and artist whose writings conjoin the dominant characterological tendency of literary fiction since the 1960s with the social antagonism we are now seeing on the streets, writing its own epic in the language of rage and fire. * Mark Steven, Senior Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature, University of Exeter, UK *
DeLillo is not the archetypal postmodern novelist we believed him to be, but an epic poet of the dispossessed, cartographer of the surplus populations thrown off by the long downturn, his fictions striving to re-historicize capitalisms cast-offs as emergent subjects of History: such is Traverss original and compelling thesis. The book effects a wholesale reconceptualization of the Jamesonian problematic of postmodernism, rewriting the relation of politics and form for the era of secular stagnation via Deleuze and Guattaris untapped notion of peripheralization: it is a critical triumph and a superlative work of Marxist literary theory. * Daniel Hartley, Assistant Professor in World Literatures, Durham University, UK *

Author Bio

Thomas Travers is an independent scholar based in the UK. He holds a doctorate in English Literature from Birkbeck, University of London, UK.