"The Contrails Streaked Cleanly in the High Sky" An Ecocritical Reading of Don DeLillo's White Noise and Underworld

Abstract

This thesis will examine the articulation, significance, and changing notion of the environment in two novels by the American author Don DeLillo: White Noise (1985) and Underworld (1997). This thesis will read DeLillo's White Noise and Underworld from an ecocritical point of view in order to explore how his texts problematize postmodernity's relation to what is natural" and constructed," how damages and dangers to our environment are perceived in this context, and how a pliant use of the term landscape" can open up a literary text for these questions.