West and its other literary responses to 911

Cultural Intertexts, Year VI Volume 9 , 2019

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980-2020, ed. Patrick O’Donnell, Stephen Burn, and Lesley Larkin. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022. Chapter 160. 1079-87. , 2022

The attacks on September 11, 2001 ushered in the Age of Terror, which is an epistemic shift in American polity from the virtual capital that fueled the dot-com boom of the 1990s to a twenty-first century marked by asymmetrical warfare across the globe. Post-9/11 narratives may turn wholly on the spectacular events of that day, or they may take account of the collective transformation in the social order, politics, psychopathology, or modes of representation in the arts. Post-9/11 narratives are not, however, a subgenre of the novel because genres have rules of literary style, and fictions that reference 9/11 are too diverse to comply with such rules. This essay will collect prominent examples into four categories according to their modes of address, their verbal mood or modality. First, the Indicative mood, in novels that make a direct address toward the event, in which the representation and experience of the attacks on 9/11 is a pivotal element of the narrative structure. Second, the Subjunctive mood, in which the event occurs offstage and the characters are proximate witnesses to the attacks. The conditional modality lends itself to works of fabulation, reflexivity, or metafiction. Third, the Interrogative mode, in whose questioning of the nature of the attacks political, judicial, or cross-cultural arguments are broached, often with regard to Islamophobia. Fourth, the Demonstrative mode, in books that document that such a thing is or was the case, in narratives of historical realism that critique the social order both before and after 9/11.

Miscelánea: A Journal of English and …, 2011

This paper investigates the ways in which recent American fiction has been modified by historical events, particularly 9/11/2001, in an attempt to propose a relational and workable periodization of the contemporary. More specifically, it describes the impact of such events both on the broader cultural imaginary in the US and beyond, and on generic and formal evolutions such as the prevalence of confessional narrative and the mainstreaming, on the one hand, of the literature of minorities, and, on the other, of genre fiction. Utopia and dystopia are therefore considered here not as genres, but rather as fictional modes and a structure of feeling that inform a number of contemporary texts which would not otherwise qualify as utopian or dystopian.

Mewar Univeristy, 2021

PREFACE This dissertation argues that white American novelistic response to the events of 9/11 places the spotlight on the domestic lives of the majority, while invoking nationalism and prose of otherness against other cultures and religions. In this predominantly WASP-cultural response, living togetherness in a multicultural society has been a far cry. Post-9/11 white American fiction deals with the nation’s trauma, and it tries to patch up the tear in the WASP cultural fabric overplaying American nationalism on the one hand, and on the other, by a prose of otherness against the Muslims. This dissertation posits such a response as the cultural trauma of the Americans. The first among the four novels under study for the dissertation—Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close—evoke ethics, melancholia, and traumatic solidarity of the Americans with the Jews, which invariably make the translation of trauma cultural—what Jeffrey Alexander calls cultural trauma. Don DeLillo’s The Falling Man, too, dramatizes the trauma of 9/11 as cultural trauma which finds its entry into the novel in the form of the novelist’s discourse of us vs. them syndrome. John Updike’s Terrorist comes out as a perfect example of cultural trauma since it others the Muslims as terrorists, while deploys a clear-cut territorial divide between Western and Eastern spaces in order to envision a unified American space. A welcome departure from the above three novels has been Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which tires to come to terms with the trauma of 9/11 by building up cosmopolitan echoes for a peaceful multicultural living in America. Taking a cue from Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as a literature of trauma of a higher order, this study uses it as a touchstone to comparatively evaluate the other three novels in terms of the representation of the trauma of 9/11 and finds them failing to match the quality of Netherland. What the examination of the representation of terrorism and the discourse of trauma in the above novels reveals is how American authors, with the exception of O’Neill, have not been able to free themselves from xenophobic media representations of 9/11. It has also aimed at raising questions about the patriotic tendency behind the canonization of the above novels of violence. Texts like Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and John Updike’s Terrorist present 9/11 as cultural trauma which is sought to be repaired through an appeal to an intensified prose of otherness which comes about due to these novelists’ attempt to understand the terrorist incident as the conflict between two contrasting frames of reference—the Orientalist stereotypes and the self-trumpeting civilized West. The prose of otherness in DeLillo and Foer is, however, not as brazen as that of Updike who resorts to an Orientalist discourse to malign the Muslim Other and reinforce stereotypes about Islam and Muslims, thus contributing to antagonism.

Transylvanian Review, 2017

9/11 and the Dystopian Imaginary: Towards a Periodization of Contemporary