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Chapter 3 - The American Southwest

“Texas Is the Reason”: Running Dog, Point Omega, and DeLillo’s “Southwest”

from Part I - Places

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2022

Jesse Kavadlo
Affiliation:
Maryville University of Saint Louis, Missouri
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Summary

Don DeLillo is not considered a regionalist writer in the American literary tradition, yet this chapter explores a primary geographical region in which his novels are often set, the Southwest, with emphasis on both urban and desert landscapes. DeLillo's early novel Running Dog and his later work Point Omega are the chapter's main examples. While DeLillo is not a regionalist in any conventional sense, the chapter explains how DeLillo's fiction disrupts literary conventions of time and space in his depiction of the American Southwest, thereby asking readers to consider a reading of DeLillo in which postmodern literary experimentalism combines with a punk rock aesthetic rooted in graffiti and political art (hence the chapter's title, which borrows a a lyric from the Misfits, a band named after a famous mid-century Western film).

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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Works Cited

Apitzsch, Julia. “The Art of Terror – The Terror of Art: Don DeLillo’s Still-Life of 9/11, Giorgio Morandi, Gerhard Richter, and Performance Art.” In Terrorism, Media and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo Edited by Schneck, Peter and Schweighauser, Phillip. Continuum, 2010: 93108.Google Scholar
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DeLillo, Don. Running Dog. Knopf, 1978.Google Scholar
DeLillo, Don. Libra. Viking, 1988.Google Scholar
DeLillo, Don. Point Omega. Scribner, 2010.Google Scholar
Lentricchia, Frank. “The American Writer as Bad Citizen.” In Introducing Don DeLillo. Edited by Lentricchia, Frank. Duke University Press, 1991: 16.Google Scholar
Marshall, Kate. “What Are the Novels of the Anthropocene? American Fiction in Geological Time.” American Literary History, 27.3, June 7, 2015: 523–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClure, John. “Postmodern Romance: Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy.” In Introducing Don DeLillo. Edited by Lentricchia, Frank. Duke University Press, 1991: 99116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Molesworth, Charles. “Don DeLillo’s Perfect Starry Night.” In Introducing Don DeLillo. Edited by Lentricchia, Frank. Duke University Press, 1991: 143–56.Google Scholar
Steiner, Wendy. “Look Who’s Modern Now” The New York Times Book Review. Oct. 10, 1999.Google Scholar

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