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Abstract
Don DeLillo’s Underworld is an 827-page maximalist systems novel that seeks to encapsulate the tenor of American culture across the span of the cold war. It is a story that follows a panoply of characters from 1950s New York City through to their later lives in the American Midwest during the advent of the internet age in the 1990s. This thesis, by critically placing the novel alongside the development of the United States Interstate Highway system, argues that the novel holds much instructive potential in understanding how contemporary American spatiality and relationality are informed by this massively material infrastructural project. This thesis delineates the novel’s investigation of the confusions of public, private, and corporate power that greatly informed cold war ideology and also inform more individual notions of spatiality. In the final analysis, this thesis sets out a more completely spatialized reckoning of our contemporary cultural moment.