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

Peripheralizing DeLillo explores how Don DeLillo's poetics evolve across genres, focusing on how he represents fully commodified social worlds and re-evaluates Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. It demonstrates how his treatment of capital and labor reconfigures debates around realism and modernism, positioning him as a composer of capitalist epics.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 13 January 2022
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Peripheralizing DeLillo delves into the intricate historical evolution of Don DeLillo's poetics, as it traverses various genres such as short fiction, romance, historical novel, and philosophical novel centered around the concept of time. Building upon theories that suggest capital, rather than the bourgeoisie, serves as the displaced subject of the novel, Thomas Travers undertakes a comprehensive exploration of DeLillo's representation of fully commodified social worlds. He reevaluates Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history, employing an innovative re-periodization to examine the evolution of DeLillo's aesthetic forms. Travers specifically focuses on how these forms register and encode one of the crises of contemporary historicity: the secular dynamics that propel societies organized around waged work towards conditions of under- and unemployment. By situating DeLillo within global histories of uneven and combined development, Travers delves into how DeLillo's treatment of capital and labor, as well as his approach to affect and narration, reconfigures debates surrounding realism and modernism. What emerges from this study is a transformed perception of DeLillo. He is no longer merely an exemplary postmodern writer but a composer of capitalist epics, a novelist drawn to the periphery of accumulation, to zones of social death whose surplus populations his fiction endeavors to re-historicize, if not re-dialecticize, as subjects of history.

Weight: 488g
Dimension: 158 x 235 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501378430