In Episode 40 DDSWTNP cover Parts 3 and 4 and Manx Martin (2) of Underworld and welcome to the show Patrick Whitmarsh, a scholar of eco-criticism, the anthropocene, and the contemporary U.S. novel. We spend time discussing the importance of Underworld to Patrick’s arguments about perspective, scale, images of the earth, and the advent of what he calls the “vertical sciences,” taking in geological discoveries, aerial viewpoints, and all the new understandings of natural and built environments that DeLillo’s novel juxtaposes. Topics and images that preoccupy us in this discussion include DeLillo’s reasons for placing side by side the views of “garbage archeologist” Jesse Detwiler, Nick’s religious self-examination, and a convention for swingers; Klara Sax’s “rooftop summer,” film-viewing, and all the honing of her artistic perspective that takes place across these 1970s sections; and the many comparisons of filmmaking and other artforms that dominate Part 4: “Cocksucker Blues,” especially Sergei Eisenstein’s science fiction and montage techniques and Ismael Muñoz’s developing graffiti work. Does DeLillo arrange Underworld according to Eisenstein’s techniques, and does this idea help mediate questions about modernism and postmodernism? What power is expressed when Moonman claims about his painted subway train, “I’m your movie, motherfucker”? What themes of ecology and lost innocence emerge in considering Klara’s views of “the West” and the Zapruder film? How do such scenes connect to the aerial photography important to Matt Shay’s surreally treated military work in “the Pocket”? What layers of paranoia cut across Manx’s quest to sell the baseball? And who can lay claim to the legacy of Charlie Parker? The discussion draws in not just Underworld but parts of DeLillo’s earlier corpus, especially ideas of “counter-archeology” from Great Jones Street. Patrick adds as well some perspectives from other U.S. fiction of the late 1990s, and all together you have another two and a half hours of insight into DeLillo and especially what his waste-centered work has to teach us about the earth and ecology. For a scholarly profile of Patrick Whitmarsh, see https://www.holycross.edu/academics/people/patrick-whitmarsh
In Episode 40 DDSWTNP cover Parts 3 and 4 and Manx Martin (2) of Underworld and welcome to the show Patrick Whitmarsh, a scholar of eco-criticism, the anthropocene, and the contemporary U.S. novel. We spend time discussing the importance of Underworld to Patrick’s arguments about perspective, scale, images of the earth, and the advent of what he calls the “vertical sciences,” taking in geological discoveries, aerial viewpoints, and all the new understandings of natural and built environments that DeLillo’s novel juxtaposes. Topics and images that preoccupy us in this discussion include DeLillo’s reasons for placing side by side the views of “garbage archeologist” Jesse Detwiler, Nick’s religious self-examination, and a convention for swingers; Klara Sax’s “rooftop summer,” film-viewing, and all the honing of her artistic perspective that takes place across these 1970s sections; and the many comparisons of filmmaking and other artforms that dominate Part 4: “Cocksucker Blues,” especially Sergei Eisenstein’s science fiction and montage techniques and Ismael Muñoz’s developing graffiti work. Does DeLillo arrange Underworld according to Eisenstein’s techniques, and does this idea help mediate questions about modernism and postmodernism? What power is expressed when Moonman claims about his painted subway train, “I’m your movie, motherfucker”? What themes of ecology and lost innocence emerge in considering Klara’s views of “the West” and the Zapruder film? How do such scenes connect to the aerial photography important to Matt Shay’s surreally treated military work in “the Pocket”? What layers of paranoia cut across Manx’s quest to sell the baseball? And who can lay claim to the legacy of Charlie Parker? The discussion draws in not just Underworld but parts of DeLillo’s earlier corpus, especially ideas of “counter-archeology” from Great Jones Street. Patrick adds as well some perspectives from other U.S. fiction of the late 1990s, and all together you have another two and a half hours of insight into DeLillo and especially what his waste-centered work has to teach us about the earth and ecology.
For a scholarly profile of Patrick Whitmarsh, see https://www.holycross.edu/academics/people/patrick-whitmarsh
Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:
Patrick Whitmarsh, Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science (Stanford, 2023); Chapter 1, “Earthly Language: Don DeLillo and the Novel of the Anthropocene.”
Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (U. of Minnesota, 2016).
Richard Williams, “Everything Under the Bomb” (interview with Don DeLillo), The Guardian, Jan. 10, 1998. https://www.theguardian.com/books/1998/jan/10/fiction.dondelillo (“When people say White Noise is post-modern, I don't really complain. I don’t say it myself. But I don’t see Underworld as post-modern. Maybe it’s the last modernist gasp. I don't know.”)
Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (Coffee House Press, 1997).