救済と廃棄 : Underworldにおける「ゴミ」(関東英文学研究)

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タイトル別名
  • Salvation and Abandonment : 'Waste' in Underworld(Kanto Review of English Literature)
  • 救済と廃棄 : Underworldにおける「ゴミ」
  • キュウサイ ト ハイキ : Underworld ニ オケル 「 ゴミ 」

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This paper offers an ecocritical reading of Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997), especially focusing on its particular treatment of waste. The novel presents how waste overflows the world today and how it influences the manners people interact with the environment they are embedded in. The early part of this fiction, which is set in the last two decades of the 20^<th> century, can be situated in the historical context of the impending garbage crisis, or garage apocalypse, which threatened America approaching the new millennium. However, the novel is more than just a portrait of the civilization characterized by excessive production of waste and a lack of capacity for its containment. It offers a very unique theorization of human society which defines itself by excluding waste. The way waste is relegated to the status of the unthinkable when it is eliminated from the place it originates is explored in the novel. The novel should be read as an attempt to bring the forgotten waste into the text. It thereby lets waste affect the thoughts of its readers, altering the ways they customarily perceive the modern environment. This paper also focuses on "recycle" which is practiced by Klara Sax, a junk artist in the novel who paints discarded B-52s and recreates them into an artwork. Some ecocritics observe that her artistic recycle exemplifies an effective means of salvation of waste and resistance against the system that produces it. However, this paper questions the validity of their opinion, suggesting that Underworld focuses more on a kind of waste which even the quasi-redemptive practice of "recycle" can never reprocess. The novel should rather be interpreted as skeptical, if not critical, about the wishful thought that the act of recreating waste can solve the problems resulting from it.

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