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

This “conversation” or what takes place “between” (entretien) comes in the form of “event” and allows for the Outside to inform the reading even if Marks does not explicitly name it as such.

Although the aims of this project do not allow for extensive engagement with DeLillo (understood as a series of texts) and his critics, the topic seems to require some acknowledgement, and my offering serves to mark a clear distinction between a more traditional literary scholarship and my project. The main point I would like to make concerning the critical scholarship in DeLillo studies is that the outside (or the force of the outside) has been either ignored or invoked in service of recouping, (re)building, or (re)envisioning an inside. For example, in American Magic and Dread, Mark Osteen argues:

The production of dread and its correlative search for magic inscribes the outside as a negative site from which characters need relief in the form of a redemptive or Oedipal inside. Specifically, I am reading “fragmentation” as a mourned fragmentation of the inside, creating this outside. Of course, Osteen is here referring to Lyotard’s famous definition of the “postmodern condition,”⁶ and the implication is that one ought to read DeLillo’s narratives, or at least the characters, as decidedly antipostmodern. To my mind, a discussion of the postmodernity of DeLillo’s oeuvre does not advance one’s understanding of his work. However, I do want to suggest that on Osteen’s reading, DeLillo’s narratives constitute a monument to the inside. There is indeed an apparent effort, most recently voiced by Jesse Kavadlo, to somehow rescue readings of DeLillo’s novels or “DeLillo” from so-called postmodern readings that fail to see the true “DeLillo,” who does not ultimately believe in a postmodern