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

of geography, time, and perception. In relation to a series of literary and philosophical texts, I read the force driving this exceedance as the Outside, and I seek to reconceptualize “landscape of estrangement” primarily as a relation to the Outside that animates and confuses the difference between inside and outside. Thus, the project takes as a general guide the following question: What does it mean to read the emergence of a landscape that is of the Outside?

The answer to this question will help contextualize this project, bringing into relief a set of texts not through the categories of “modern,” “postmodern,” or “romantic,” but rather their relation to the Outside. Thinking of the book as an “assemblage with the outside” also means, within the particular context of this study, that my concept “landscape of estrangement” is not necessarily restricted to the site of literature and can emerge via visual or auditory landscapes. To extend this thought even further, a notion my study suggests, but one that would require a whole other project, is that America itself can be read as a landscape of estrangement. If one were inclined to read novels as representations of America, then one could argue that the landscapes found in those novels would be representations of America’s landscapes of estrangement. For example, the landscapes found in DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis might refer simultaneously to New York City and America at large. This, however, is not what I have in mind. In my view, to think of America as a landscape of estrangement would mean taking the novels produced within America as elements—not representations—of that landscape, and as such they would be available among other aspects, such as film, music, politics, photography, and architecture. Sites through which DeLillo’s novels have been consistently read—the city, garbage, technology, film, terrorism—all contribute to the emergence of a landscape of estrangement within America. Perhaps literature and film—or what I will call fabulation—provide the most profitable sites for reading this emergence given their potential for narrative, which as one shall see is particularly suffused with such landscapes. I must make clear at this point a distinction between what I am proposing and an approach to DeLillo studies Jesse Kavadlo has identified as an inclination “to use DeLillo as a