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

emerges within a specific relation to a logic governing the movement from outside to inside.

Chapter 1, “Landscapes of Estrangement,” introduces my central concept, landscapes of estrangement, and its essential tributaries: time, space, and the Outside. The development of the concept necessarily brings into view my subsequent applications and extensions of it. I conceive of a landscape of estrangement not as a map or topology of another, possible world, but a converse, flip-sided possibility of all worlds. As a concept, not a description of a production or topology, a landscape of estrangement produces an event—that is, a nonplace—of simultaneous confinement and escape, loss and finding, relation and nonrelation, inside and outside. The second chapter, “A Pure Outsider for Literature,” borrows Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “aesthetic figure” and Blanchot’s “attractor” and “stranger” in order to develop the “pure outsider” as that which, minus particularities and reason, attracts to the Outside. I develop this outsider in contrast to a modern literary trope that depicts this character as simply an “insider” gone astray. The focus is on Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, Bartleby, and Mr. Tuttle in The Body Artist. Chapter 3, “Welcoming the Outside: A Reading of Hospitality and Event in Derrida and Deleuze,” examines the relationship between Deleuzian events, Derridean hospitality, and the Outside. After reading Derrida’s hospitality in terms of the Outside—to say that absolute hospitality is a welcoming of the Outside—I argue that my concept, landscape of estrangement, allows for a coexistence of conditional and absolute hospitality in a Deleuzian “event.” From there, the study delves more into delicate readings of the forces of the Outside. In other words, I shift from a more expository approach to a more explicatory. Chapter 4, “A Question of Hospitality in The Body Artist and Cosmopolis,” explores scenes of hospitality in The Body Artist and Cosmopolis. The primary concern is the extension of hospitality to a “pure outsider.” The relation to the Outside occurs within an interrupted scene of hospitality, where the possibility of Derridean absolute hospitality emerges. In the context of the previous readings, chapter 5, “The Mourning of Lauren Hartke,” analyzes how mourning, the uncanny, and becoming offer sites for the