ABSTRACT
The three authors discussed in this chapter represent an admixture of the aesthetics, the temporal and spatial perspectives, as well as the urban themes discussed in the works by the previous three writers. The three represent a continuation of and a commentary on the European-American novelistic tradition as they seek to take that tradition in new directions. The texts discussed range from the late 1960s for Joyce Carol Oates’ them, to the 1970s for Don Delillo’s Great Jones Street and Players, to the 1980s for Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. In them, Oates writes within the tradition of realism and naturalism even as she undermines the efficacy of those models for representing reality. Delillo is something of a postmodern realist, concentrating on how language and media affect the contemporary subject. Auster writes in the tradition of Beckett and other European writers as he rewrites and contemporizes to some extent the American Romantics. Each writer presents urban alienation at a social and personal level and the self-consciousness of self-making, as well as a fictional self-consciousness. Like the works discussed previously, the works under consideration in this chapter demonstrate the tensions inherent between claustrophobic urban spaces and the expansive possibilities of the urban environment. Time tends to flatten out in these works as characters live in an ever present now, without a feeling of connection with a historical or personal past, a trait that helps feed their self-making and their alienation. Thereby, each author deals with alienation and disconnection in the contemporary world, though from very different viewpoints, and each deals with identity and self-creation, chaos versus the search for order in the urban environment.
