Delirious USA: the representation of capital in the fiction of Don DeLillo

In this thesis I offer a new reading of Don DeLillo’s fiction through an engagement with contemporary Marxist literary theory and political economy. Beginning in the 1960s, the thesis traces the launch, expansion, and shattering of DeLillo’s narrative apparatus as it recomposes itself across the genres of the short story, the conspiratorial thriller, the historical novel, and the novel of time. Developing on theories of the novel as a capitalist epic, the thesis takes the insistent appearance of surplus populations in DeLillo’s work as an opportunity to reflect on, but also to revise and reconceptualise, Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. The DeLillo that emerges from this thesis is less an exemplar of postmodernism and more a novelist of the dispossessed whose central representational task is the invention of a multitude. Chapter One contends that DeLillo’s early short stories from the 1960s acquire a new recognisability in the wake of his late turn towards an aesthetic of suspension. The chapter questions whether the forms of stasis depicted in DeLillo’s short fiction generate new historical futures or if they contribute to a de-collectivised eternal present that later consumes his work. Chapter Two addresses DeLillo’s off-kilter conspiracy novels and reads their discovery of pockets of uneven development through and against the concept of ‘cognitive mapping’. Chapter Three examines the formal means by which DeLillo appropriates Georg Lukács’s classic account of the historical novel and reconfigures it through an irrational historicism that hinges on the non-presupposition of the people. Chapter Four considers the extent to which the non-anthropogenic subjects of history that constrain and inform DeLillo’s twenty-first century fiction constitute political resignation or if they intimate historical futures beyond a catastrophic present. The thesis concludes with a brief reflection on passages out of DeLillo’s epic representation of capitalism

Delirious USA: the representation of capital in the fiction of Don DeLillo

In this thesis I offer a new reading of Don DeLillo’s fiction through an engagement with contemporary Marxist literary theory and political economy. Beginning in the 1960s, the thesis traces the launch, expansion, and shattering of DeLillo’s narrative apparatus as it recomposes itself across the genres of the short story, the conspiratorial thriller, the historical novel, and the novel of time. Developing on theories of the novel as a capitalist epic, the thesis takes the insistent appearance of surplus populations in DeLillo’s work as an opportunity to reflect on, but also to revise and reconceptualise, Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. The DeLillo that emerges from this thesis is less an exemplar of postmodernism and more a novelist of the dispossessed whose central representational task is the invention of a multitude. Chapter One contends that DeLillo’s early short stories from the 1960s acquire a new recognisability in the wake of his late turn towards an aesthetic of suspension. The chapter questions whether the forms of stasis depicted in DeLillo’s short fiction generate new historical futures or if they contribute to a de-collectivised eternal present that later consumes his work. Chapter Two addresses DeLillo’s off-kilter conspiracy novels and reads their discovery of pockets of uneven development through and against the concept of ‘cognitive mapping’. Chapter Three examines the formal means by which DeLillo appropriates Georg Lukács’s classic account of the historical novel and reconfigures it through an irrational historicism that hinges on the non-presupposition of the people. Chapter Four considers the extent to which the non-anthropogenic subjects of history that constrain and inform DeLillo’s twenty-first century fiction constitute political resignation or if they intimate historical futures beyond a catastrophic present. The thesis concludes with a brief reflection on passages out of DeLillo’s epic representation of capitalism

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead