To Relive Things
The Thingly Turn in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22430558 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Masaomi Kobayashi (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1991-9336 • E-ISSN: 1991-9336 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/16krx |
| OpenAlex | W7168341888 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 18 |
The present essay brings into sharp focus the question of things—both material and immaterial—that exist in their own right in Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel, Cosmopolis. Set against the exponential growth of digitalization that enables things to be far more networked than ever beofe, the novel is open to theoretical approaches such as actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology which play an influential role in the turn of the century movement of new materialism that challenges the textual bias in humanities studies. An attempt is hence made to re-explore a broad range of things in the novel from the perspective of the so-called “thingly turn.” In so doing, those things reveal themselves as relivable things. Cosmopolis allows rediscovering the thought-provoking nature of things, and this essay concludes that the novel represents his new millennium fiction that creates its own sense of things.
Historical materialism · Materialism · Ontology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Modern American Literature Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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