Characters of Asian descent have remained a rarity within American writer Don DeLillo's works. Meanwhile, his early fiction has received far less scholarly attention than his mid-career novels. This paper, for the first time in DeLillo studies, brings Ratner's Star (1976)—one of his underexamined early works that includes a Chinese American character, and Mao II (1991)—one of his acclaimed works concerning China's politics, into dialogue, to uncover a new intertextual dimension within DeLillo's oeuvre that situates them within broader geopolitical contexts. Drawing on the writer's literary philosophy that "fiction is all about reliving things," I argue that DeLillo's authorial consciousness of the political dynamics in Sino-U.S. relations from the 1970s to the 1980s underlies his representations of China in the two works. First, based on archives from research materials for Ratner's Star, this paper reveals that DeLillo's portrayal of Maurice Wu—a Chinese American archaeologist fascinated by Chinese culture and employed by an organization promoting Sino-American scientific collaborations—reflects the cultural and political climate of the 1970s United States, when Western centrism was increasingly criticized for being ignorant to other cultures and U.S.-China relations were moving toward rapprochement. In Mao II, by contrast, the earlier emphasis on the enigmatic aspects of Chinese culture gives way to a more direct engagement with the political turbulence of late-1980s China that captured global attention. By tracing an intertextual connection between the two DeLillo novels, this paper sheds light on how transformations in Cold War U.S.-China relations are reflected and refracted within American literary discourse.

Authors:
Lijun Wang, Otemon Gakuin University, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Lijun Wang is a lecturer at Otemon Gakuin University. She attended Osaka University in Japan for PhD degree in American literature after abtaining her M.A. from Yunnan University in China.Her research interests include Don DeLillo and others.

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