Ecocriticism In Don Delillo's 'Underworld' By Don Delillo
5228 Words21 Pages
The novel recapitulates many of the themes of DeLillo’s previous novels: consumer detritus, media saturation, and the decentered world of global capitalism. UnderWorld introduces an issue that remained in the shadows in his earlier novels ‘the bomb.’ It is not just that nuclear bomb goes underground in landfills and bunker systems under mountains in Niveda. Rather, the specter of nuclear disaster is part of the “Underworld” of the social unconscious. The bomb is the “Other” of the contemporary world, the real specter that haunts the floating zones of desire of postmodern culture. Ultimately, Underworld takes us into the postmodern terrain of the present, where nuclear power has triumphed. In the last section of the novel, Nick Shay is sent to Russia to investigate business prospects, specifically of investing in a Russian company that specializes in nuclear energy.
Underworld by Don DeLillo is a book about two people from the Bronx who have a brief affair and then go their separate ways. One becomes a famous artist and the other becomes a respected executive in the field of waste management. Forty years later,…show more content… Linda Hutcheon emphatically argues that, ecocriticm and the study of it is, “a reflection on actual praxis and continue to derive their critical force from their conjuction with that social and aesthetic practice” (16). Glen A. Love in his Practical Ecocriticism asserts that the nature-endorses “gain credibility in being drawn to real problems and in advocating and working toward analyses and solutions, while the nature-skeptics do not” (8). Patrick D. Murphy clarifies the confusion in his Ecocritical Explorations in literary and Cultural Studies