Don DeLillo’s Mapping of the City

Taking as his point of departure the immense significance the city has for understanding the present moment and the special relationship the city has had with the novel, the author gives a reading of Don DeLillo and the way his work has engaged the city of New York. Focusing upon his last two novels, Underworld and Cosmopolis, the author describes how these two novels narrate the transformations the American city has undergone during the second part of the twentieth century. The bulk of his analysis deals with the function the Prologue flashback of the Bronx has in the earlier novel and the transformed city of late capitalism in his last text. The author concludes his reading by pointing out how DeLillo’s novels not only provide fictional accounts of what has occurred in the urban sphere but how they provide evidence of the difficulty of representing the contemporary world and how they foreground urgent political considerations