Publication: Historicizing the Iraq War in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

Update from a previous post, now with a final PDF.

About

This is a Cambridge "FirstView" version of an article forthcoming in Journal of American Studies. This article is copyright 2014 Cambridge University Press. This version of the paper is made available as gratis green open access in accordance with the publisher's policy.

Title

"Too many goddamn echoes": Historicizing the Iraq War in Don DeLillo's Point Omega

Abstract

This piece provides a detailed engagement with Don DeLillo's depiction of the 2003 Iraq war in his latest novel, Point Omega. Framed through both formal aesthetic signposting of the interrelations between modernist and postmodernist practice and also through explicit thematic comparison between the conflicts, I trace DeLillo's treatment of Iraq in Point Omega back to his earlier writing on the Cold War in Underworld and focus upon the ways in which this comparative historical metaphor can be read with particular emphasis upon its implications for the nation state.

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The piece can be downloaded from this site, from Academia.edu or, eventually once the embargo has expired, from the Lincoln repository.