The Material Agency In Don Delillo's Novels

Don DeLillo expresses his concerns with material agency in many of his postmillennial novels.He points out that material agency is the key for people lost in the contemporary technocratic society to recover meaning and truth in worldly life.This thesis studies The Body Artist(2001),Cosmopolis(2003),Point Omega(2010),Zero K(2016)as a combination from the perspective of new materialism to clarify comprehensively DeLillo's attitudes on the vibrant matter.This thesis divides agency into two categories as “presence” and “person”,referring to technological matter and natural matter respectively.“Presence” refers to the agency of the invisible systems of techno-discourse and ideologies produced by technological matter;while the agential capacity of “person” refers to the immense ontological forces embedded in all those natural matter we can touch and grasp.In making this division,the thesis argues that technological matter may lead to transgressions of boundaries as the concept of human body comes to be increasingly modeled by technological interactions,processes and networks.Enmeshed in an mediated society where the surplus of technological images,jargons,and codes stands for the world it erases,people are completely swallowed up in the abstracted hyperreal.The virtual space of information then becomes a site of control,blocking people from sensing their body and life in a genuine way.To reconstruct our destabilized subjectivity demands for a reappraisal of the role that natural matter plays in shaping our perception.It emphasizes embodiment as an essential part of cognitive processes,points to ordinary objects as sites of orientation and transcendence,and encourages genuine experience and feeling in our discursive exchanges with the material-energetic cosmos.