A Waste of a Desert: Nevada and the Cold War Chemical Legacy

Authors

  • Cinzia Scarpino

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13130/2035-7680/398

Abstract

Taking the lead from Don DeLillo’s epic novel Underworld (1997) – with its overarching theme of “waste” functioning as its unifying metaphor and its picture of the American deserts turned into hazardous waste dumps or missile depots – this essay provides a close reading of the empty spaces of the Nevada desert, spaces that bear the mark left by the nuclear exploitation and the hazardous waste which have plagued Nevada since the Fifties. By linking the history of Nevada to the Cold War, and to the chemical legacy of those years, with its notions of “containment” and “weather control”, Scarpino argues that they be read as interwoven threads of the same discourse. 

Author Biography

  • Cinzia Scarpino
    Cinzia Scarpino completed her doctoral dissertation devoted to “Whale and Waste.
    Reading Underworld by Don DeLillo through Moby-Dick” at the University of Milan. Her
    main fields of research are American twentieth-century short-story writers (Ernest
    Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Raymond Carver, Grace Paley), and contemporary
    authors with a New York focus (Don DeLillo, Paul Auster). She has co-edited the
    volume I Soprano e gli altri. I serial televisivi

Downloads

Published

2009-12-15

Issue

No. 1 (2009): Miscellanea

Section

Saggi Ensayos Essais Essays

How to Cite

“A Waste of a Desert: Nevada and the Cold War Chemical Legacy”. 2009. Altre Modernità, no. 1 (December): 62-76. https://doi.org/10.13130/2035-7680/398.