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

Chapter 1

Landscapes
of Estrangement

Throughout his fifteen novels, Don DeLillo has constructed a late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century American landscape that simultaneously defines and defies what it means to be in and/or of twentieth-/twenty-first-century America. Perhaps only Thomas Pynchon’s novels rival the complexity and sophistication of these landscapes. However, while these two writers are often cited as the twin pillars of American postmodernism, this study neither works comparatively between the two nor argues that these landscapes are a consequence of or reducible to any postmodernness of twentieth-century America. Rather, as stated in the Introduction, I will read landscapes that exceed the normal limits of geography, time, and perception and, hence, destabilize the whole notion of landscape. In order to make a bridge between the represented landscape and the concept of a landscape of estrangement I will be developing, I turn to a scene from DeLillo’s seemingly most complex novel, Underworld,