Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.37
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-8166-1268In the twenty-first century, an unprecedented confluence of digital technology, media saturation, surveillance systems and global capitalism has transformed reality into a domain increasingly ruled by simulations. This paper offers a comparative study of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and Samit Basu’s The City Inside (2022) in the light of the theory of hyperreality, drawing mainly on Jean Baudrillard’s account of simulacra and simulation, with reference to Guy Debord, Marshall McLuhan, Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson.
The study investigates how the two novels represent worlds in which mediated representation has replaced lived experience. While Cosmopolis surveys the hyperreal conditions through financial abstraction and digital capitalism in contemporary America, The City Inside portrays a technologically saturated India in which reality is curated through algorithmic entertainment and surveillance. The paper argues that the two novels, though set in different cultural and geographical contexts, reveal hyperreality as a transcultural condition of late global capitalism, in which screens, data and spectacle matter more than material reality itself, while showing that each setting shapes this condition in culturally specific ways.
Sarika, and Abhilasha Singh. “Beyond the Real: Hyperreality, Spectacle and Simulated Worlds in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and Samit Basu’s The City Inside.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 674-90, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.37.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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