Opening frames

Over the course of a literary career which stretches back to 1960, Don DeLillo has written 18 novels, 23 short stories, 9 plays, a screenplay and 12 essays. DeLillo’s canonical status has been consolidated by a vast quantity of literary criticism to which this study aims to contribute. One of the governing tropes in this field proposes that DeLillo specialises in the ‘novel of ideas’ and writes ‘essay-like fiction’. This study does not seek to contest that claim but highlights the extent to which the intellectual is always embodied in the author’s work. DeLillo’s fiction can be defined by the intimate connection between the conceptual and the corporeal and in particular the varieties of visual experience. This introductory chapter begins with the visual dimension of the writing itself as a form of concrete prose poetry produced on a typewriter. We proceed to illustrate the main argument by looking at DeLillo’s The Body Artist in which the philosophical contemplation of time is grounded in a fleshy drama of perception. The chapter concludes with a preliminary survey of the main ways of seeing dramatised in DeLillo’s work associated with science and technology, capitalism and advertising, art, the everyday and religion. In addition, we establish a theoretical framework which combines Marxism and phenomenology and in particular the work of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.