Owning the end of the world: Zero K and DeLillo’s post-postmodern mutation

ABSTRACT

Don DeLillo often has been un-problematically designated as a second-generation postmodernist, with his most prominent novels seemingly affirming his place within the canon of postmodern American fiction. “Owning the End of the World” troubles this commonplace, mapping out the works of “late period” DeLillo, most importantly Zero K, in order to reveal the complex evolution of DeLillo’s more recent work. This essay situates DeLillo’s treatment of the human condition in Zero K as a superficial companion and spiritual counter to White Noise, underscoring DeLillo’s turn away from a postmodern outlook and to a more post-postmodern stance gaining traction in the twenty-first century.

KEYWORDS:

• Don DeLillo
• post-postmodernism
• posthumanism
• transhumanism

Notes

1. Engulfment with disaster footage is also notable in Libra, with the assassinations of JFK and Oswald; in Underworld, with the video showing a driver murdered by the Texas Highway Killer; and even in the rarely scrutinized film Game 6, in which Nicky Rogan, played by Michael Keaton, watches the Boston Red Sox blow the World Series in what would extend the Red Sox’s history of futility and become perhaps the most infamous and replayed moment in baseball history.

2. “Extensive” capitalism, per Nealon, entails “seeking new markets, new raw materials, untapped resources,” while “intensive” capitalism “seeks primarily to saturate and deepen—intensify—its hold over existing markets, insofar as global capitalism of the twenty-first century has run out of new territories to conquer” (26).

3. Paula Martín Salván rightly points out the trend in DeLillo’s fiction of “individuals for whom conventional models of community have lost the capacity to provide meaningful identities” (218).

4. As Randy Laist argues, “Jack experiences the supermarket in terms of the threats it articulates against his vulnerable person… they remind him of himself and his peril” (71).

5. Jeffrey’s confession that he tries to imagine an inner monologue for Artis in “the open prose of a third-person voice that is also her voice, a form of chant in a single low tone” (272) problematizes this interpretation somewhat, but in either case, the outlook of her cryonic suspension is decidedly negative.

6. Jagoda uses this term in reference to the networked experience offered by cyperspace, but it seems equally applicable to other social, networked experiences.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erik Cofer

Erik Cofer is a PhD scholar specializing in contemporary literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.