“Because There Is Something About You, in the Way You Hold a Space”
Don DeLillo’s New York in “Cosmopolis” and “Falling Man”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2023.i21.1247Parole chiave:
American Studies, Don DeLillo, 9/11, cosmopolitanism, globalization, urban theoryAbstract
New York City space puts forward multifold arrays of reflection on the state of the contemporary human self, in particular, of human beings in their interaction with an avantgarde, pompous, profit-oriented, world-reaching, rapid, and ephemeral space. Two post 9/11 Don DeLillo novels: Cosmopolis (2003) and Falling Man (2007) meticulously exhibit the spatial and temporal impact on urban environment and its inhabitants. The present paper scans New York’s urban space in these two novels, categorizing it into exteriors that encompass Manhattan’s streets and squares, and interiors that encompass hair salons, a ruined private flat and the destroyed Twin Towers. These spaces are scrutinized through an interdisciplinary approach that combines fiction with urban and social theory using views of Marshal Berman, Kwame Appiah, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault among others. Revealing cultural divides in public spaces and a dual reality in confined spaces, the close analysis outlines aspects of DeLillo’s early 21st-century New York in which space is not detached from time in shaping an estranged self. The analysis, further, suggests that the accepted break in the flow of creativity and everyday life in the world city before and after 9/11, is, on the contrary, a continuous stream of trauma and a repeated pattern of destruction and creation.
Riferimenti bibliografici
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994.
Berman, Marshall. All that is Solid Melts into Air. London: Verso, 1999.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “A New Refutation of Time.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1964. 217-234.
Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Certeau, Michel de. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 91-110.
Conte, Joseph M. “Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and The Age of Terror.” Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 559-583.
DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Picador, 2011a.
--- Falling Man. New York: Picador, 2011b.
---. Great Jones Street. New York: Penguin, 1994.
---. “In the Ruins of the Future.” The Guardian 21 December 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo. Last visited 30/05/2022.
---. Underworld. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1998.
Duvall, John. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Farmasi, Lilla. “‘[P]ure, dumb canine instinct’: Narrative Space and Motion (lessness) in Don DeLillo’s ‘The Ivory Acrobat.’” Space, Gender, and the Gaze in Literature and Art. Edited by Agnes Zsofia Kovacs and Laszlo B Sari. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 47-62.
Flannery, Eoin. Ireland and Ecocriticism: Literature, History and Environmental Justice. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Foucault, Michel. “Questions on Geography.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Hertfordshire: The Harvester Press, 1980. 63-77.
Gupta, Suman. “Global Cities and Cosmopolis.” Globalization and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. 37-53.
Kavaldo, Jesse. Don DeLillo in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Leyens, Jacques-Phillippe, Vincent Y. Yzerbyt and Georges Schadron, edited by. Stereotypes and Social Cognition. London: SAGE Publications, 1994.
Leary, Mark R. and June Price Tangney, edited by. Handbook of Self and Identity. 2nd. New York: The Guilford Press, 2012.
Li, Victor. “The Untimely in Globalization’s Time: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.” Globalizations 13.3 (2015): 1-14.
Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” Space, Place, and Gender. Edited by Patricia L. Price and Timothy S. Oakes. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. 146-156.
Michelucci, Stefania. Space and Place in the Works of D. H. Lawrence. Trans. Jill Franks. London: McFarland & Company, 2002.
Morley, Catherine. The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. London: Routledge, 2009.
Moynihan, Sinead. “‘Upground and belowground topographies:’ The Chronotopes of Skyscraper and Subway in Colum McCann’s New York Novels Before and After 9/11.” Studies in American Fiction 39.2 (2012): 269-290.
Page, Max. The Creative Destruction of Manhattan: 1900-1940. London: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Pile, Steve. “Psychoanalysis and Space.” The Body and the City. New York: Routledge, 1996. 145-169.
Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Morrow, 1974.
Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890.
Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. 1974. New York: Norton, 1992.
Simmel, George. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. Edited by Richard Sennett. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969. 47-60.
Tallack, Douglas. Twentieth Century America: The Intellectual and Cultural Context. Essex: Longman, 1991.
Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Society. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1988.
Twining, James E. “Alienation as a Social Process.” The Sociological Quarterly 21.3 (1980): 417-428.
Veggian, Henry. Understanding Don DeLillo. South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2015.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Zeynep Celik, Diane Favro and Richard Ingersoll, edited by. Streets: Critical Perspective on Public Space. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Dowloads
Pubblicato
Fascicolo
Sezione
Licenza
Copyright (c) 2023 Alsahira Alkhayer
Questo volume è pubblicato con la licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale 4.0 Internazionale.
Iperstoria è una rivista accademica ad accesso libero.
a. Gli autori detengono il copyright e danno alla rivista il diritto per la prima pubblicazione con il contributo sotto licenza Creative Commons che permette di condividere l’articolo con il riconoscimento della prima pubblicazione su questa rivista.
b. Gli autori possono inoltre stabilire ulteriori direttive contrattuali per la distribuzione non esclusiva della versione del contributo pubblicata sulla rivista (es. ripubblicarlo in archivi istituzionali o in un volume), con uno specifico riconoscimento della prima pubblicazione su questa rivista. Chiediamo pertanto agli autori di contattarci nel caso di eventuali ripubblicazioni.
