postmodern wasteland don delillos underworld54.1.isaacson文献资料.pdfVIP

PostModerN WAsteLANds: Underworld ANd the ProduCtiVe FAiLures oF PeriodizAtioN Johanna isaacson don delillo’s Underworld is a postmodern novel that thematizes its own situation by showing, in its tropes and forms, the stakes and impossibili- ties of periodization. the new novel is a grand gesture in an age when high art and realism are waning forms of representation and the social forms that gave birth to the novel have decayed, are etherealized and in flux. the dominant tropes in Underworld point to this condition of fertile decay. elegiac in its tone and themes, the novel’s world is one of ruin and resurrection. Underworld, like other novels in this genre such as Against the day and The corrections, negotiate their own possible obsolescence, their contradictory terms and premises, and their “liberal form” and by doing so become relevant once again.1 here i want to look at this genre as a new moment in a long trajectory of debates on aesthetics and politics that are generally discussed in terms of early twentieth-century modernism and proletarianized “cultural front” political forms.2 At this earlier moment, the existence of a Communist Party, strong unions, and a self-aware pro- letariat supported the hope for engaged literature and aesthetics. today, the idea of an engaged literature that can map modes of alienation, class antagonism, and exploitation in light of the mode of production may seem like a retrograde critical positioning. But here i will look at how the idea of engaged literature, of politicized culture, haunts the text and navigates historically variant understandings of politicization and depoliticization. My analysis will be informed by Fredric Jameson’s periodization of post- modern culture as embodying the logic of late capitalism and his notion of utopia as a form of critical negation. My argument also owes much to Christopher Connery’s periodization of politicization and depoliti