Don Delillo's Fiction of Finance Capital

Abstract

Over the years, few scholars have focused on the centrality of finance capital and its workings within Don DeLillo's fiction. Indeed, not only does the world of finance capital serve as a background to the actions and the events of some of DeLillo's most famous novels (i.e. Players and Cosmopolis), but it plays a much more systematic and structural role in his entire oeuvre. The present article seeks to offer an overview of DeLillo's works as an expression and critique of the financialization of the US and world economy and to highlight the significance of finance capital as an interpretative paradigm for understanding DeLillo's fiction through the work of mourning and melancholia. The article wishes to contextualise such a materialist reading of DeLillo's oeuvre within a broader, but still very small, strand of ‘DeLillian’ scholarship, which recognises the novelist's preoccupation with the social and cultural effects of a predominantly financial era. Ultimately, this paper stresses that a financial reading of DeLillo's fiction does not only constitute a valuable contribution to DeLillo's scholarship, but that such an investigation of the relationship between literary fiction and economic, especially financial, regimes, can provide a significant insight into the long-term effects that the global ascent and crisis of finance capital over the last 40 years has had on the current US social and cultural condition.