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

emergence of landscapes of estrangement in Cosmopolis, The Body Artist, and White Noise.

In addition to the obvious inspiration from DeLillo’s novels, the following enterprise finds its general philosophical, strategic, and methodological inspiration in the works of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Blanchot; a more pointed source, however, indeed one that has been unabashedly borrowed, is a concept developed by Cesare Casarino—philopoesis. In his preface to Modernity at Sea, Casarino explains that “Philopoesis names a certain discontinuous and refractive interference between philosophy and literature” (xiv). Casarino borrows Deleuze’s notion of “zones of indiscernibility” to describe the product of philopoetic discourse as “the interferences between philosophy and literature” (xxii). The relation between philosophy and nonphilosophy, while at first thought might be coincidental or, worse, forced, is taken to be “essential and positive.”¹⁰ I borrow one more item from Casarino—his notion of a “perfect” text: “To say that the text is perfect is to say that it cannot be perfected or chastised, but it is not to say that it should not be read and rewritten” (xxxv). Casarino believes that because the text is “perfect,” it “haunts us.” From this position, it follows that great appreciation and care for a text means welcoming it without conditionality, perhaps even allowing it at times to take one hostage, and I bring with me this appreciation and care in the pages that follow.