<span class='italic'>The American Southwest</span>

doi:10.1017/9781009025676.005

Chapter 3 - The American Southwest

“Texas Is the Reason”: Running Dog, Point Omega, and DeLillo’s “Southwest”

from Part I - Places

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 May 2022

Henry Veggian

Edited by

Jesse Kavadlo

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Jesse Kavadlo: Affiliation:
Maryville University of Saint Louis, Missouri

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Summary

Don DeLillo is not considered a regionalist writer in the American literary tradition, yet this chapter explores a primary geographical region in which his novels are often set, the Southwest, with emphasis on both urban and desert landscapes. DeLillo's early novel Running Dog and his later work Point Omega are the chapter's main examples. While DeLillo is not a regionalist in any conventional sense, the chapter explains how DeLillo's fiction disrupts literary conventions of time and space in his depiction of the American Southwest, thereby asking readers to consider a reading of DeLillo in which postmodern literary experimentalism combines with a punk rock aesthetic rooted in graffiti and political art (hence the chapter's title, which borrows a a lyric from the Misfits, a band named after a famous mid-century Western film).

Keywords

Don DeLillo Running Dog Libra Point Omega Texas The Misfits Anthropocene American Southwest

Type: Chapter
Information: Don DeLillo In Context , pp. 26 - 38

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009025676.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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References

Works Cited

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