Subjectivity in Three Postmodern Novels by Don DeLillo and Paul Auster: Mao II, Cosmopolis and Leviathan

Abstract

This thesis explores how fictional characters come to occupy subject positions through ideological processes such as interpellation. It studies how the subject positions the character occupy define their whole lives; even hinder the development in their lives. By analysing what I refer to as the capitalistic subject position in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003), the radicalised and politicised subject position in Paul Auster's Leviathan (1992), and the familial and authorial subject positions in Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991). This thesis argues that these novels imagine a reconseptualisation of our understanding of what it means to have a self, and what it means to be completely or partially in agreement with the determining ideological processes. The selected characters are interpellated into their subject positions, however all of them are struggling to be fully interpellated by the 'hail', the calling of ideology. This thesis claims that all subjects are always-already interpellated as subjects to ideology, as there is nothing on the outside of ideology.