Reading Landscape in American Literature: The Outside in the Fic ...

Webster, who writes: “But it seems, given the growing interest in the life works of Deleuze and Guattari, that their analyses might in some ways be adaptable to a study of American narratives” (1).⁵ He describes his overall argument thus:

While Webster does not deal explicitly with the Outside, his analyses of frontiers in and as American narrative assume a logic of exteriority and bordering that employs the general inside/outside binary.

If this study exists in part as a response to a perceived call for Deleuzian-informed readings of American literature—and in particular an American literature of the Outside—its readings do not purport to employ Deleuzian “tools” to unearth new truths about the novels. For as Hugh Crawford rightly points out, any hopes or desires for a new Deleuzian interpretive regime to be applied to American literature are misplaced at best: “Indeed, for Anglo-American literary scholars, these hopes are raised higher by his frequent references to Lawrence, Miller, Woolf and Melville (to name but a few of his literary touchstones)”(57). Yet “Deleuze’s famed ‘toolbox’ does not include a hammer to break open the closed and privileged system of a novel or poem to reveal hidden gleams of truth contained within” (57). As for the scholarly relation between Deleuze and DeLillo, to my knowledge the only sustained Deleuzian approach taken to a DeLillo novel is John Marks’ “Underworld: The People are Missing,” where he uses