Mutability as Counter-Plot: Apocalypse, Time, and Schematic Imagination in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist

Abstract

This article begins by situating Don DeLillo’s late writing in the critical context proceeding from Romanticism, and establishes an analogy between Keats’s late poem, “The Fall of Hyperion,” and the narrative dynamic that underwrites several of the novelist’s most recent works. It then takes up a more detailed reading of The Body Artist, interpreting apocalypse as a trope enabling reflection on the temporality of literary language. Situating DeLillo’s work in the context of Romanticism enables the establishment of a link between the author’s late work and the Kantian “crisis” which brought to light, with profound literary consequences, the faculty of Imagination (Einbildingskraft) as a putting-into-figure, and mimèsis as “presentation” (Darstellung), studied here as effects of the body artist’s traumatic experience of loss.

Keywords

• DeLillo Don
• Keats John
• Romanticism
• postmodernity
• imagination
• mimesis