New York Writing: Urban Art in Don DeLillo's Underworld

New York Writing: Urban Art in Don DeLillo's Underworld

[SHS:LITT] Humanities and Social Sciences/Literature

DeLillo

Underworld

graffiti

urban art

writing

aura

capitalism

literature

postmodern

Through the ekphrastic descriptions occurring in Underworld, Don DeLillo meditates on the place and nature of art in postmodern American society and, at the same time, represents his own art of fiction. In the postmodern metropolis public space has become saturated with the signs and systems of commercial activity. The novel's artist figures have to win back an audience and to impose their own forms of communication. They have to reappropriate available surfaces and superscript them with their own images and colors. In exploring the aesthetics of these fictional artists, and of the graffiti writer Ismael Muñoz in particular, DeLillo produces his own aesthetic manifesto. His novel suggests that the role of the late twentieth century American artist is to respond to the visual and intellectual assault that the media have mounted against the public, first by placing dominant productions at an ironic distance, and then by transforming discredited modes of expression into new cultural forms. The novel embraces and even adopts the urban graffiti impulse while adding other dimensions not available to the visual arts. It brings together the fragmented and disjunctive images of city life into a narrative, adding a temporal as well as spatial dimension. From the detritus of contemporary capitalism Underworld creates new myths that restore humanity to a culture dehumanized by its own technology.

Harding, Wendy

Anglophonia / Caliban

2009

ENG

article in peer-reviewed journal

http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00769206

http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/76/92/06/PDF/DeLillo_W._Harding.pdf