9/11 and the Dystopian Imaginary

Transylvanian Review, 2017

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

2014

Fantasies of Oblivion proposes that a series of post-9/11 literary textsincluding David Foster Wallace's The Suffering Channel, Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, Martin Amis' "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta," Teju Cole's Open City and Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edgereveal contradictions inherent to the dominant historical narratives of 11 September 2001. In their fiction, these authors stage a set of cultural, social and historical fantasies that obscured the material and symbolic implications of the terrorist attacks, but show those fantasies to be misleading and incomplete descriptions of American history and identity. My project converses with two dominant strands within studies of post-9/11 literature: one strand claims that the current archive of texts reproduces the ideological myopia already evident so soon after the attacks; the other contends that the texts participate in a necessary and therapeutic project of personal, urban and national healing. In contrast, my dissertation argues that Wallace, Moore, Amis, Cole and Pynchon take oblique approaches to 11 September 2001 in order to displace the dominant temporal genres of traumatic shock, nostalgic return and melancholic futurity that circulate around the tragic events. I claim these temporal genres are fantasies of "oblivion" not just because they are fantasies fixated on erasing the traumatic spectacle of real death at the hands of foreign powers, but also because they facilitate disavowal of symbolic death, preventing the realization that America is nonidentical with its self-image and in fact, this non-identity is built into its self-image. If the nation retreated into its founding myths of altruism, innocence and exceptionalism, and thus missed an opportunity on 11 September 2001 to better understand itself and its role in the world, then the post-9/11 literary archive reveals the limitations of this retreat and in doing so generates an opportunity to traverse the fantasies of the nation and reopen the void the nation too quickly closed, the abyssal "Ground-Zero" of the psyche.

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.

My dissertation focuses on a set of Anglo-American novels that deal with the events of 9/11. Identifying thematic and stylistic differences in the fiction on this topic, I distinguish between novels that represent directly the jolts of trauma in the wake of the attacks, and novels that, while still holding the events as an underlying operative force in the narrative, do not openly represent them but envision their long-term aftermath. The first group of novels comprises Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall (2005), Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). The second one includes Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (2009), John Updike's Terrorist (2006) and. Drawing on concepts from trauma theory, particularly by Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, and combining them with the ethical philosophies of Levinas and Heidegger, I argue that the constructions of 9/11 in Anglo-American fiction are essentially twofold: authors who narrate 9/11 as a tragic human loss in the city of New York turn it into an occasion for an ethical dialogue with the reader and potentially with the "Other," whereas authors who address 9/11 as a recent sociopolitical event transform it into a goad toward a bitter cultural indictment of the US middle-class, whose ingrained inertia, patriotism and self-righteousness have been either magnified or twisted by the attacks. Considering processes of meaning-making, annihilation, ideological reduction and apathy that arose from 9/11 and its versions, I have identified what could be called, adapting Peter Elbow's expression from pedagogical studies, the "forked" rhetoric of media and Throughout these years at Waterloo, I was fortunate to enjoy the guidance, assistance, support, and friendship of many without whom this work would not have taken shape. Here, I hope to acknowledge and thank most of them. First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Kevin McGuirk, for his continuous insight and caring. His invaluable suggestions at difficult times have contributed a lot towards the success of this thesis. I do not think my accomplishments would have been possible without his constant support and timely feedback and I am forever grateful to him for letting me pursue my research under his guidance. Next, my warmest thanks go to Profs. Andrew McMurry and Marcel O'Gorman for having accepted to be part of this project and offering their expertise -and Prof. O'Gorman especially for taking some time off his busy schedule to peruse my dissertation and serve on the defense committee at the last moment. A special thanks goes to Prof. David Jarraway from the University of Ottawa for producing an exciting and stimulating report on my dissertation, which has contributed to illuminate many points of it and to suggest future avenues of research. I also wish to thank the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo for giving me the opportunity to enter their PhD program and work in a first-class academic environment, making me feel deeply valued as a person and as a scholar. Here, I was also privileged to meet many exceptional peers and colleagues, most of all Craig Love and Danila Sokolov, who shared with me enlightening conversations and warm words of comfort in moments of anxiety, as well as genuine bouts of humor in front of vii a drink. A special acknowledgment goes to both of them. Finally, this has been an amazing experience for me, one that took place very far away from home, therefore I am exceptionally grateful to my friends from Italy Elena and Emanuele for their generous friendship here in Waterloo, and to Leonardo, whose love and passionate encouragement made me believe in me more than I have ever did. I thank Monica Stellin for being such a strong ally of mine throughout this time in Canada and for inspiring me with her own unquestionable knowledge and elegance. Daniela Daniele continues to be an outstanding example of an academic for me and she still indirectly informs my work ethics and my thoughts in the field of American Literature. My gratitude rests with Rosanna Barborini and all my family and friends from Udine, who have been constantly on my side, providing the moral support they knew I needed throughout this time. Note: chapters Seven, Eight and Nine are expanded and revised versions of articles published in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (11.2) 2011, and Altre Modernità

Brno Studies in English, 2024

This article examines the boundaries of the term 9/11 novel by exploring what we truly mean when we say a novel is about 9/11 and what are the issues in reading general twenty-first-century literature through 9/11. By taking a thorough look at 9/11 literary scholarship, I argue that the issue of defining the 9/11 novel has been largely overlooked; consequently, the label 9/11 has often been stamped too easily on twenty-first-century fiction. In the aim to establish the boundaries of 9/11 fiction, I compare the thematic, temporal, and spatial features of some of the most iconic 9/11 novels to two works which have been commonly read as 9/11 novels even though they do not explicitly discuss the attacks, Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. By building on this discussion, I offer a concise definition of what a 9/11 novel is and where 9/11 ends.

2018

Aiming to map the role of literature among the apparatuses of cultural and social significance in the context of the events of September 11, 2001, and inspired by New Historicism/Cultural Materialism, Gheorghiu advocates a neorealist approach to 9/11 fiction. This introductory chapter considers the way in which the imprint of political and media discourses can be traced at the level of fiction. Also discussed is the reconfiguration of ideas and (re)constructed images of reality in the context of an unprecedented rise of alterity awareness, with the intention to demonstrate that the three types of discourse in the subtitle accentuate, purposely or not, the differences between the poles of the classical West–East dichotomy.

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.