A Study Of Urban Heterotopia In Don De Lillo's Cosmopolis

Don DeLillo is an excellent American writer.He is famous for his novels,short stories,plays,and critical essays.He is one of the greatest contemporary American writers,known as “post-modernist novelist”.Harold Bloom,a famous American critic,thinks that Cormac McCarthy,Philip Ross,Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo are the four great American novelists in contemporary times.So far,Don DeLillo has published more than ten novels and won numerous awards.Among them,White Noise has been awarded the “National Book Award of the United States” and is praised as the peak of post-modern literature.Mao II is awarded the Faulkner Prize,Libra is awarded the Irish Times International Novel Prize.Most of the protagonists characterized by DeLillo are eager to explore themselves,and they are caught in the self-paradox of fear of losing their subjectivity.Most of his works mainly depict American social life since the 20 th century,revealing the problems and dilemmas faced by human beings in the post-modern industrialized society,as well as the hidden social crisis,which shows DeLillo's humanistic concern.Cosmopolis,published in 2003,is DeLillo's thirteenth novel.The book is known as the post-modern version of Ulysses and depicts Eric's one-day experience.The novel shows many aspects of society,including alienation and paranoia,reality and imagination,death and body,terrorism and globalization.Some critics believe that Cosmopolis is one of the best American works in recent years.For the extensive coverage of DeLillo's works,Chinese and foreign scholars have gradually realized the literary and social values in his novels,and the research has gradually set off a round of upsurges.However,in general,most of the research perspectives focus on language style,writing skills,thematic research,alienation,consumerism,and ecologism.With the spatial turn of literary research,space research has gradually deepened.Foucault's theory of heterotopia gradually appears in people's vision and becomes a good perspective of literary research.Heterotopia is essentially a space created by the extension of substance.It is found by the number of researches that DeLillo creates many spaces with the characteristics of heterotopia in Cosmopolis.To explore the metaphorical meanings behind these spaces will help to understand the situation of post-modern society more deeply.This paper will discuss the urban heterotopia in Cosmopolis from the following aspects.This paper is divided into three parts.The introduction aims to show the general situation of Don DeLillo and his Cosmopolis,expounds Foucault's theory of heterotopia,and combs the research situation of DeLillo's Cosmopolis at home and abroad.The second part is the text,which contains three chapters.In the first chapter,the thesis mainly uses Foucault's two types of heterotopia to study the concrete manifestation and social value of heterotopia in Cosmopolis.The crisis type of heterotopia in Cosmopolis mainly describes the imbalance between the sexes and the rampant male chauvinism,resulting in women becoming “individuals in crisis” in society.The deviant type of heterotopia mainly introduces the alienation and deviation of individuals in the space of heterotopia,as well as the phenomenon of being divorced from subjectivity.In the second chapter,through the in-depth analysis of three typical urban spaces of Cosmopolis: the abandoned buildings,carnival theatres,and cars,the social relations in the space are explained,and the spatial characteristics of heterotopia are analyzed.Chapter three analyses the relationship between heterotopia and human beings from three perspectives: death,power,and body of urban residents.The conclusion summarizes the previous analysis and points out that there is no specific single form of urban heterotopia,and it is not only manifested in the aspect of urban space,but also in social,political,economic and cultural aspects,which can reflect the characteristics of urban heterotopia.Cosmopolis ostensibly depicts the city of New York,but with the help of Foucault's theory of heterotopia,it is found that the metropolis is,in essence,a huge heterotopia in post-modern society,which is full of many isolated heterotopic spaces.Through careful analysis of these spaces,the life and spiritual outlook of urban people is further revealed,and the internal conflicts and spiritual crises in this heterotopia are revealed.