It is a key element of DeLillo’s late style, this essay argues, that the tautology becomes its dominant formal feature. We might think of The Body Artist: ‘The word for moonlight is moonlight’. Or we might think of Zero K: ‘The ceiling was low, the bed was bedlike, the chair was a chair’.

This essay asks what the function and effect of the tautology is in late DeLillo, as this relates to his relationship with history on one hand, and with the materiality of embodied being on the other. In one sense, the tautology might appear to be the mark of a loss of attachment to the world, or to a historical materialism. The tautology might enact the failure of language to refer to anything beyond itself. But if this is so, the essay suggests that the tautology is the mark not only of a kind of failure of reference in late DeLillo, but also a new kind of referential structure, a new way in which language refers both to the body and to history, both to space and to time.

How does the contemporary novel imagine utopian possibility in the wake of the global dominance of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century?  This chapter suggests that we can discern two forms in which the novel responds to this perceived waning of American power. The first of these is an elegiac strand in the contemporary American novel, which mourns the failure of the American ideal and laments the exhaustion of its historical possibility. The second sees in the same failure of US hegemony not the winding down of a world view, but the emergence of new forms of cultural hybridity, new subject positions that come to thought only now, in the wake of the “American century.” This chapter suggests that, in order to understand the persistence of utopian thinking into the contemporary moment, one has to attend to both of these strands in the novel after American hegemony. The old word is dying, we might say, in an echo of Gramsci’s famous line, and the new cannot be born. It is in this interregnum that we find not only morbid symptoms, but the emergence of new forms of utopian possibility.

While Don DeLillo is an Italian American and son of immigrants, his fiction often has an ambivalent relationship with his biographical detail. He does not claim to be, and is seldom interpreted as, an ethnic writer.

This chapter places DeLillo within the context of his contemporaries, but also examines his influence on the next generation of writers, examining what we are able to understand today about his literary legacy.

Don DeLillo is a profoundly religious writer. He is a religious writer because of the questions he asks rather than the answers he finds. He is a religious writer because of how he depicts characters wrestling with moral problems, not because of how those characters emerge victorious from such battles. He is a religious writer because his work is persistently drawn to sacred encounters with the numinous, immanent, and transcendent, even though such moments may prove illusory and are always transient. This chapter traces the evolution of critical perspectives on DeLillo as a religious writer, beginning with postmodern critiques of his metaphysical preoccupations, to defenses of DeLillo’s redemptive moral vision, through post-secular reassessments of his enduring reverence for quotidian mystery. The chapter then examines specific manifestations of spirituality in several DeLillo works, particularly White Noise, Libra, and Underworld. DeLillo raises religious questions and offers responses ranging from parodic skepticism to partial faith. He features religious meditations which glow with quotidian mystery yet remain enveloped by an impenetrable cloud of unknowing.

“Postmodern Ecology in Don DeLillo’s Fiction” offers an ecocritical reading of DeLillo’s fiction through the lens of pastoralism, nature studies and apocalypse. Drawing from earlier discussion of ecology in DeLillo’s novel as well as from discussions of ecocrtiticism and place-based studies, this chapter focuses on several of DeLillo’s seminal works, White Noise, Underworld and Zero-K, along with his early short story “Creation” to demonstrate the presentation and evolution of environmental themes and messages throughout his oeuvre. By first looking at DeLillo’s inclusion and inversion of the tradition of pastoral in fiction and then moving towards a consideration of the trope of apocalypse, the chapter aims to prove how DeLillo makes an argument for place-based consciousness and environmental awareness and responsibility throughout his fiction.

A critical consensus has emerged that, rather than consolidating masculine power, DeLillo’s fiction unsettles it by exposing masculinity as a fragile social construct. Bearing in mind Philip Nel’s injection   to consider DeLillo’s depiction of women as well as men, this chapter argues that DeLillo’s fiction not only undermines the central myths of white American manhood, but it also actively favours feminine forms of subjectivity and a feminine aesthetic. While DeLillo’s white men attempt to recover “true” selves that never existed, his women are fully aware of the ways in which the culture they inhabit both constructs and constitutes their subjectivity. More or less immune to the hankering for the real that haunts his men, DeLillo’s women, especially his women artists, tend instead to manipulate existing cultural codes in a fashion that permits them – paradoxically – some of the autonomy that his male characters seek. DeLillo’s recurrent engagement in his most recent fiction with the threat posed to women viewers of art demonstrates that his work remains committed to the scrutiny and critique of misogyny and masculinity in its most toxic manifestations.

Don DeLillo, this chapter argues, has created innovative narratives from the typecast materials of popular genre fiction. It demonstrates that genre novels and films, from spy thrillers and noir to mafia stories and horror, have often served DeLillo as, counterintuitively, a blank canvas – not as a narrowing template or pre-determined plot but as grounds for subversion, especially of the ideologies popular genres tend to encode, including the myths of individual agency with which DeLillo’s characters often strongly (and wrongheadedly) identify. DeLillo has remained interested in responding to generic narratives throughout his nearly fifty-year career because genres’ tired conventions and predictable endings often act as foils to his far more distinctive explorations of violence and death, that real-world ending, particularly in his late-career invocations of horror. The chapter examines primarily examples from Running Dog, Players, Libra, Underworld, The Body Artist, and Point Omega.

Throughout DeLillo's fiction, DeLillo, like Underworld's Nick Shay, shakes free from the constraints of his own biographical history and personal relationship with the Bronx in particular.

Don DeLillo's work is known for addressing certain topics in depth; among these are television and consumerism. Most articles focus their attention on White Noise; however, if one reads pretty much any work by DeLillo, mass media – newspapers, radio, television, film, the internet, in addition to the mass consumption and information overload that comes with them – will be present either as a major thematic concern or a steady, omniscient buzz in the background. For the handful of texts in which it is not, particularly those of the twenty-first century, their characters often retreat to almost uninhabited and occasionally downright inhospitable settings, making the near absence of technology all the more palpable. Written before the release of The Silence (2020), this chapter demonstrates how DeLillo’s body of work – from Americana (1970) to Zero K (2016) – documents how mass media since the mid-twentieth century has helped shape individual identity, culture, and history in the USA, as well as anticipating some of the dangers mass media man poses to contemporary society.

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).

Don DeLillo’s fiction has long catalogued American fear and dread surrounding the future. While a select few texts, most memorably Underworld (1997) and Falling Man (2007), foreground a sense of narrative and cultural possibility, the future is often depicted as a lament. That sense of future vision is evident in his latest text – at the time of writing – Zero K (2016), which explores environmental decline and a shift from Underworld’s ideal of a democratic collective to a neoliberal embrace of necropolitics. Using both ecocriticism and a range of prior DeLillo scholarship, this chapter reads Zero K as a prescient warning of political upheaval and loss, and thus anticipates how hope and renewal can be located even in DeLillo’s late period writings.

Don DeLillo's work is frequently described as postmodern, even as his stated influences are modernists. This chapter discusses both terms in relation to DeLillo's work, toward an understanding that neither label necessarily brings readers towards a clearer understanding.

As an anatomist of socially inculcated identities, DeLillo deploys a recurring motif of automobility, which helps to dramatize and often satirize some common white American male inclinations. Propelled by a sense of something missing in their routinely plotted lives, DeLillo’s protagonists often lurch into escape mode in an archetypal white American male way, by jumping in a car and hitting the road. However, their clichéd and encapsulating choice of vehicular transport itself signals how difficult it can be to escape an identity largely formed by negation, that is, by white masculinity’s self-defining exploitation of others. Given the conceptual emptiness that DeLillo finds at the heart of white American male identity, pursuits of a seemingly more genuine self usually result in such protagonists driving themselves right back to where they more or less began.

With so much attention on DeLillo’s novels, it is easy to lose track of his success and eminence as a playwright. DeLillo has written five full-length plays, The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), The Day Room (first production 1986), Valparaiso (first production 1999), Love-Lies-Bleeding (first production 2005), and The Word for Snow (first production 2007), several of which continue to be produced regularly in theatres throughout the world. Through these plays, readers can understand the influence of various playwrights on both the plays and the novels, as well as the influence that DeLillo’s sociopolitical context had on his playwriting. By examining the wider context in which the plays sit, in addition to the theatrical elements of spoken word, scene, spectatorship and ephemerality, we will notice how writing for the theatre is a political act for this writer.

DeLillo has often been portrayed as a “reclusive author.” Even though this characterization of the man himself is not quite accurate, DeLillo’s work is rife with images of artists as solitary geniuses who eschew the spotlight. On a structural level, that image is manifested as well in how DeLillo himself rejects the postmodernist trend toward self-reflexivity and metafictional authorial intrusions. Instead, DeLillo’s work evinces the artistry of a distant but still controlling godlike author-figure, whom his characters can sense but not see.

DeLillo’s fiction acts as a commentary on the human condition and its relation to spatial stimuli. New York City represents a fixed point of reference that the author revisits and continuously extracts meaning from its inhabitants’ movement throughout the cityscape and the architectural constructs that affect their lives.

Most critics who analyze so-called “late” works—those written by elderly authors – seek to classify those works in terms of stylistic traits. Yet these critics’ definitions frequently contradict each other, suggesting that, as Michael and Linda Hutcheon write, “there are as many late styles as there are late artists.” In light of the fact that many of Don DeLillo’s recent works concentrate on loss and the work of mourning, this chapter proposes that his post-millennial novels display a form of lateness manifest   less in style than in theme and character. Specifically, his late-career works present an array of near-death, suspended life, or afterlife experiences: a gallery of ghosts, zombies and vampires through which, as Edward Said remarks about late musical works, “death appears in a refracted mode, as irony” (24). In other words, the late DeLillo, as he displays in his novels The Body Artist, Falling Man, Point Omega, and Zero K, and his story “The Starveling,” is concerned less with death than with undeath.