More than any other major American author Don DeLillo has examined the manner in which
contemporary American consciousness has been shaped by the historically unique incursion into
daily life of information military and consumer technologies. In DeLillo's fictions
technological apparatuses are not merely set-pieces in the characters' environments nor merely
tools to move the plot along they are sites of mystery and magic whirlpools of space-time
and convex mirrors of identity. Television sets filmic images automobiles airplanes
telephones computers and nuclear bombs are not simply objects in the world for DeLillo's
characters they are psychological phenomena that shape the possibilities for action influence
the nature of perception and incorporate themselves into the fabric of memory and identity.
DeLillo is a phenomenologist of the contemporary technoscape and an ecologist of our new kind
of natural habitat. Through a close reading of four DeLillo novels Technology and Postmodern
Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels examines the variety of modes in which DeLillo's fictions
illustrate the technologically mediated confluence of his human subjects and the field of
cultural objects in which they discover themselves. The model of interactionism between human
beings and technological instruments that is implicit in DeLillo's writing suggests significant
applications both to the study of other contemporary novelists as well as to contemporary
cultural studies.
