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Silva, Elise Christine. "Terror, Performance and Post 9/11 Literature." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2011. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/2724.
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This project explores 9/11 as a performative act that is re-represented in post 9/11 fiction. Although many scholars have engaged spectacle theory to understand the event, this project asserts that performance theory gives a more dynamic and ethical reading of post 9/11 literatures like Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Don DeLillo's Falling Man. The aforementioned post 9/11 texts showcase narrative performances and also give formal performances for an audience of readers. Theatricality in these texts promotes dialogue and healing through interactive communication.
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Moonitz, Allison B. "“An Experience Outside of Culture”: A Taxonomy of 9/11 Adult Fiction." Thesis, School of Information and Library Science, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1901/247.
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Serving as an unfortunate benchmark for the twenty-first century, 9/11 has completely altered society’s perceptions of personal safety, security and social identity, along with provoking intense emotional reactions. One outlet for these resulting emotions has been through art and literature. Five years have since passed and contemporary authors are still struggling to accurately represent that tragic day and its consequent impression. This paper provides an analysis of how the events of 9/11 have been incorporated into adult fiction. Variations of themes related to psychology, interpersonal relationships, political and social perspectives, and heroism were found to be used most frequently among authors.
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Hemsworth, Kirsty. "Translation and/as empathy : mapping translation shifts in 9/11 fiction." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2017. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/19920/.
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This thesis seeks to establish an unprecedented empathic approach to the comparative analysis of 9/11 fiction in translation. The central tenet of this study is that translation – as a creative, subversive and disarming force – is a fundamentally empathic process. As parallel and reciprocal works of fiction, 9/11 novels and their translations are not only bound by the centrifugal force of the traumatic event at their centres, but perform, expand and subvert the same empathic structures and interactions on which they are founded. By foregrounding an innovative comparison of translation shifts, this thesis will map the potential for interactivity and reciprocity across the translation divide, and reinstate the translated text as a rich terrain for textual analysis. This thesis will focus on four key works of fiction and their French translations: Falling Man and L’homme qui tombe (Don DeLillo), The Submission and Un Concours de Circonstances (Amy Waldman), Terrorist and Terroriste (John Updike), and The Zero and Le Zéro (Jess Walter). This topographical overview of 9/11 fiction offers a deliberately fragmentary and episodic account of a genre that is unsettled in translation, with a view to capturing, and testing the limits of, the vast temporal, empathic and imaginative networks in which the texts and their translations participate. By drawing complex empathic maps of 9/11 fiction and their translations, this thesis will emphasise the value of translation shifts as an innovative and critical tool for literary analysis. It seeks to expand the limits of contemporary literary translation approaches to accommodate dynamic, empathic forms of analysis and textual modes of comparison, where both source and target texts are indivisible from the empathically-unsettled terrains in which they are forged.
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Findlay, Laura. "The anxiety of expression : word, image and sound in 9/11 fiction." Thesis, University of Dundee, 2014. https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/cc681150-17a7-4e7f-aedd-2465bdd7d540.
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Responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 came in many forms - political, social, cultural, and military. The events of that day shaped the first decade of the 21st century, and continue to have enormous resonance worldwide. This research project examines a particular aspect of the response to September 11 – the literary one, and more specifically, New York fiction. However, in conducting this research it became apparent that the effect of these traumatic events deeply scarred writers, and their writing, and the process of creating fiction about New York was one which was threatened by the enormity of the events. Also, these texts seemed to be in dialogue with other forms of responses to the events in other media. The sense of a community coming together to examine the wound that had been received was strong in New York after the attacks, and that same spirit of coming together could be seen in works that could be labelled as “Post 9/11”. These included comics and graphic novels, artworks, and projects like The Sonic Memorial. This thesis will consider the relationship between these some of works in order to highlight some of the most important aspects of the literary and cultural response. The introduction sets out the historical context and establishes the texts and artworks which will be examined, giving an overview of the research. The first chapter looks at Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Art Spiegelman’s comic In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). It argues that text and image exist in an uneasy relationship in these works, replicating both the lack of comprehension of the events and gaps in memory or expression that emerged through the retelling of the events of September 11. This is one response to the difficulties that come with the attempt to express trauma through narrative, particularly when the political and historical circumstances being described are so complex, and the emotions that surround the event are so raw. The second chapter considers the controversial relationship between performance, art, and acts of terror in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man and Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 cycle of artworks. The final chapter explores narrative and testimony in Paul Auster’s novel Man in the Dark and The Sonic Memorial Project, which gathered sounds and reminiscences related to the Twin Towers and September 11. The methodology of considering fiction alongside other modes of response is embedded in the structure of the thesis, with each chapter exploring a major novel alongside a related artwork or narrative. This mirrors the cacophonous and varied responses to 9/11, but also captures something of the way in which the reaction to the trauma brought sometimes distinct and separate people, voices and perspectives together in the spirit of sharing experiences and perspectives. It is concluded that the act of creating a piece of literature, artwork, or another kind of narrative, about September 11 is often confronted by the traumatic nature of the events, and that many responses to them internalised this problem, becoming as much about the nature of trauma, and how it makes certain memories and thoughts extremely difficult to express, at least in a way that is equal to the emotion involved. September 11 poses a challenge to artists that is much wider than the problem of representing the event itself. It asks artists and writers to consider how one can represent a traumatic and widely witnessed event, and whether world-changing events require an upheaval of literary and artistic conventions. It also questions the role of the writer or artist in the face of what Don DeLillo described as ‘all that howling space’. The thesis concludes that the strategy employed by most of the works examined here is to use unconventional methods to construct a memorial to those lost, but to do so in a way that involves the reader, bringing them into the events, but also pointing to the process of creating a post-9/11 artwork, and the difficulties inherent in it. This maintains the long established tradition of metafiction in New York fiction, demonstrating that these are works that do not seek a complete break with the past, but bring a new raw edge of tragedy and trauma into the metafiction. In this way formal play, and the attention to the process of creating a text or artwork becomes a means of representing the trauma of the event, and the trauma of creating literature and art about it. The metafictional aspects therefore become a means of cathartically approaching the site of the wound. This is perhaps why so much post 9/11 fiction remains either controversial or divides critics. It looks at both the event and its own processes. Whether or not this is satisfying to the reader, or the critic, it does point to the anxieties felt by writers and the wider creative community in the wake of 9/11.
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Donica, Joseph Lloyd. "Disaster's Culture of Utopia after 9/11 and Katrina: Fiction, Documentary, Memorial." OpenSIUC, 2012. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/460.
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This dissertation examines the cleared spaces after disaster and the way the rhetoric of utopian projects is taken up by corporate and privatizing ventures to mask projects that seek to shut down participation in the public sphere. Chapter one argues that there are mechanisms within societies that can push against these forces by promoting a cosmopolitan sensibility that protects the commons and respects the alterity of the Other. Such mechanisms have theoretical roots in the thinking of Robert Nozick and Fredric Jameson but have been rethought more recently by Bruce Robbins, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Seyla Benhabib. I read literature alongside documentaries and memorials to discover the way cultural texts model these methods of pushing back against neoliberal projects in the wake of 9/11 and Katrina by bringing ethics, as Emmanuel Levinas does, into "real world" situations. Projects that co-opt the commons after disaster convey a imitative cosmopolitanism that can be counteracted through giving agency to those who do not have it, constructing communities of access for the future, supporting a form of public mourning that promotes critique, and protecting post-disaster spaces from becoming only tourist destinations. Chapter two looks to the way the 9/11 fiction of Moshin Hamid, Claire Messud, Alissa Torres, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Safran Foer models a cosmopolitanism that repairs the self's relationship to the Other by allowing the Other an agency previously unavailable before 9/11. Chapter three examines how When the Levees Broke, Trouble the Water, Kamp Katrina, Katrina Ballads, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, and Zeitoun foreground the vulnerability of Gulf Coast residents by linking their vulnerability to the nation's now damaged ecological relationship to the coast. Chapter four explores the cultural memory at a range of 9/11 and Katrina memorials in New York, Washington D. C., and along the Gulf Coast in order to find memorials that reinvigorate the commons by melding public mourning with critique. The epilogue examines the larger implications of my dissertation for the field of American studies in examining the culture of disaster that has arisen in the past decade.
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Reilly, Elizabeth. "The resurgence of the moral novel in the wake of 9-11." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/4963.
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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on November 5, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.
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McDaniel, Ferris W. "Whatever It Is We're Competing For." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2017. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2345.
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Mehta, Suhaan Kiran. "Cosmopolitanism, Fundamentalism, and Empire: 9/11 Fiction and Film from Pakistan and the Pakistani Diaspora." The Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1376953595.
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Mohamad, Lina. "The burden of valour : the hero and the terrorist-villain in post-9/11 popular fiction." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/17598.
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My research is a literary study which primarily examines previously unstudied best-selling action-thriller fiction primary material from the US, Britain and Russia (published in the decade following the 11 September 2001 attacks) in the contexts of hegemonic masculinity and Self and Other stereotyping. I analyse thirteen works by the following popular fiction authors: Vince Flynn, Daniel Silva, Nelson DeMille, Frederick Forsyth and Danil Koretskiy. Drawing on masculinity studies and archetypal psychology, I formulate the model of the archetypal hero – a character type which the above authors‘ works capitalise on. I trace the employment of this model in these primary works within the framework of constructing a positive and heroic image of the Self, of which the action-thriller hero is the chief representative. The archetypal hero‘s principal traits include courage, honour, individualism and just violence among others. Heroes such as Mitch Rapp, Gabriel Allon, John Corey, Mike Martin, Max Kardanov and Alexei Mal‘tsev embody this archetypal model and confirm it as positive and dominant in their respective narratives. The authors also utilise a variety of framing strategies to enhance their heroes‘ authoritativeness and characterisation. Among these strategies, the use of historical facts and figures to anchor the narrative, enemy acknowledgement of the hero‘s qualities and female characters‘ fulfilment of traditional gender roles are the most prominent. First-person narration also plays a role in enhancing authenticity, such as in DeMille‘s novels. While the heroes and the side they represent are characterised as inherently positive and superior, their terrorist antagonists fulfil the role of the essentialised and diametrically opposite Other. I demonstrate through further analysis how these characters are positioned as archetypal terrorists, embodying traits which are antithetical to the hero‘s: backwardness; hatred of modernity and ‗civilisation‘; religion (Islam) as their source of hatred; desire for arbitrary revenge and unjustified violence; hypocrisy and disloyalty. Having analysed the main archetypal heroes and villains in the primary action-thriller works, I proceed to examine two mainstream literary authors: American John Updike and Algerian Francophone Yasmina Khadra. I study those of their novels which foreground terrorist characters instead of archetypal heroes, thus analysing one novel by Updike (Terrorist) and two by Khadra (Les Sirènes de Bagdad and L’Attentat). I find that, despite an increased focus on the character of the budding teenage suicide bomber from New Jersey, Updike‘s characterisation follows a pattern similar to the archetypal terrorist in the action-thriller sources. On the other hand, Khadra achieves a more balanced and complex portrayal, presenting his terrorists as human beings motivated by their various personal, social and political grievances rather than blind religious hatred. In sum, only Khadra‘s narratives transcend stereotypical views of terrorism, while the other post-9/11 primary works (including Updike) focus on perpetuating binary oppositions of the Self and Other, masculinity and emasculation. My original contribution to knowledge is the identification, definition and comparative textual analysis of archetypal hero and terrorist characters in post-9/11 action-thriller and mainstream fiction in three languages (English, Russian and French) within a framework combining several elements: aspects of the system of representation of the terrorist Other, masculinity studies and archetypal psychology as well as the context of political and media post-9/11 views of Arabs and/or Muslims in the US, Britain and Russia.
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Bennett, Eve. "A man's end of the world? : gender in post-9/11 American apocalyptic television." Thesis, De Montfort University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2086/11439.
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This thesis is an investigation of the representation of gender in the many American fiction television programmes dealing with the theme of apocalypse that debuted in the post-9/11 period, specifically between September 2002 and August 2012. It is the first study of this cycle of programmes, as well as the first overview of gender in twenty-first-century American telefantasy. The thesis takes a broadly cultural studies approach, mainly employing close textual analysis as its methodology. The aim of the thesis is, firstly, to point out some of the recurring narrative patterns and motifs relating to gender in the 25 programmes which fall within its remit and, secondly, to consider to what extent it is possible to draw links between the representation of gender in these programmes and contemporary events, especially 9/11 and the ‘war on terror.’ In particular, it aims to discern whether the series in question show the same reversion to traditional notions of masculinity and femininity that critics such as Susan Faludi (2007) have identified in American factual media of the same period. Following the introduction and literature review, Chapter One examines two archetypes of masculinity that were widely invoked by the American media in the aftermath of 9/11, the cowboy and the superhero, as they are respectively portrayed in The Walking Dead (2010- ) and Heroes (2006-2010). Chapter Two explores the representation of father-son relationships in a number of apocalyptic programmes and suggests that they tend to follow a narrative pattern which I refer to as the ‘Prince Hal narrative.’ Chapter Three examines the typical perpetrators of the apocalypses in these shows, patriarchal conspiracies, and the gendered dynamics between the conspirators, their victims and the heroes that attempt to stop them. It focuses on Jericho (2006-2008) and Dollhouse (2009-2010). Chapter Four looks at the conspiracies’ primary victims: young women who have been turned, against their will, into human ‘weapons.’ Finally, the conclusion notes the continuing popularity of apocalypse as a theme on American television, reiterates the previous chapters’ conclusions and draws some more general ones before indicating possible areas for further study.
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Fitting, Jessica. "Attack of the Fallen! Cinematic Portrayals of Fallen Angels in Post 9/11 Science Fiction Film." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2010. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/2.
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Abstract: The science fiction films which feature the angel Gabriel (The Prophecy (1995), Van Helsing (2004), Constantine (2005), Gabriel (2007), and Legion (2010)) represent a trend in exploring specific socio-cultural issues of America. All of these films explore fears over the loss of faith in American culture in a post 9/11 society. They are comparable to the ways in which science fiction films of the 1950’s addressed fears of the Cold War. By utilizing the alien invasion plot structure from the 50’s, contemporary plots have a pre-defined structure and film language in which to explore the themes of a crisis of faith. The fallen angels featured in all these films have their textual basis in the apocalyptic Jewish text of 1 Enoch, which presents an alternate origin of evil tale to the one found in the Christian Bible, which attributes to wicked fallen angels and provides the religious archetypal themes, moral basis and story ark for the fallen angels of the films. Furthermore, the films evoke an “uncanny Other” through the use of the angel Gabriel, who is a familiar Christian figure but who is uncanny in his modern portrayals, allowing frightening fears of the loss of faith and Christian identity to be explored through a familiar figure. Finally, the fears of encountering a “Muslim Other” in a post 9/11 world, and the millennial fears of uncertainty, are the cultural factors that lead to this crisis of faith present in all of these films.
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Santin, Bryan Michael. "REPRESENTING THE TRAUMA OF 9/11 IN U.S. FICTION: JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER, DON DELILLO AND JESS WALTER." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1313527497.
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Lampert, Jo Ann. "The whole world shook: shifts in ethnic, national and heroic identities in children's fiction about 9/11." Queensland University of Technology, 2007. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16550/.
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Like many other cataclysmic events September 11, a day now popularly believed to have 'changed the world', has become a topic taken up by children's writers. This thesis, titled The Whole World Shook: Ethnic, National and Heroic Identities in Children's Fiction About 9/11, examines how cultural identities are constructed within fictional texts for young people written about the attacks on the Twin Towers. It identifies three significant identity categories encoded in 9/11 books for children: ethnic identities, national identities, and heroic identities. The thesis argues that the identities formed within the selected children's texts are in flux, privileging performances of identities that are contingent on post-9/11 politics. This study is located within the field of children's literature criticism, which supports the understanding that children's books, like all texts, play a role in the production of identities. Children's literature is highly significant both in its pedagogical intent (to instruct and induct children into cultural practices and beliefs) and in its obscurity (in making the complex simple enough for children, and from sometimes intentionally shying away from difficult things). This literary criticism informed the study that the texts, if they were to be written at all, would be complex, varied and most likely as ambiguous and contradictory as the responses to the attacks on New York themselves. The theoretical framework for this thesis draws on a range of critical theories including literary theory, cultural studies, studies of performativity and postmodernism. This critical framework informs the approach by providing ways for: (i) understanding how political and ideological work is performed in children's literature; (ii) interrogating the constructed nature of cultural identities; (iii) developing a nuanced methodology for carrying out a close textual analysis. The textual analysis examines a representative sample of children's texts about 9/11, including picture books, young adult fiction, and a selection of DC Comics. Each chapter focuses on a different though related identity category. Chapter Four examines the performance of ethnic identities and race politics within a sample of picture books and young adult fiction; Chapter Five analyses the construction of collective, national identities in another set of texts; and Chapter Six does analytic work on a third set of texts, demonstrating the strategic performance of particular kinds of heroic identities. I argue that performances of cultural identities constructed in these texts draw on familiar versions of identities as well as contribute to new ones. These textual constructions can be seen as offering some certainties in increasingly uncertain times. The study finds, in its sample of books a co-mingling of xenophobia and tolerance; a binaried competition between good and evil and global harmony and national insularity; and a lauding of both the commonplace hero and the super-human. Being a recent corpus of texts about 9/11, these texts provide information on the kinds of 'selves' that appear to be privileged in the West since 2001. The thesis concludes that the shifting identities evident in texts that are being produced for children about 9/11 offer implicit and explicit accounts of what constitute good citizenship, loyalty to nation and community, and desirable attributes in a Western post-9/11 context. This thesis makes an original contribution to the field of children's literature by providing a focussed and sustained analysis of how texts for children about 9/11 contribute to formations of identity in these complex times of cultural unease and global unrest.
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Maasarani, Mohammad Noah. "Orientalism updated : aesthetics of Orientalism after 9/11 and the war on Iraq between truth and fiction." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/48485/.
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World perception is governed by an us-versus-them binary mode of thought, which has been tackled as “Orientalism” in Edward Said’s book of the same title, in which he shows the discursive nature of this pattern and shows its dissemination across scholarly work, fictional novels, travel literature, paintings and other works. However, to talk about Orientalism now is to talk about a stagnant academic debate over what counts as orientalist and what does not, and to discuss whether the word “Orientalist” is in any way derogatory. This debate and the notion of Orientalism as racism come from the association of Orientalist representations with an idea of a “truth” behind them. Fictional works fluctuate between a notion of representation, and an artistic license to produce whatever sells to the majority of the public. Orientalism only exists through the passive acceptance of such divisions. Edward Said began his project at this point of general passivity, but the weight of a categorical system of knowledge division weighed down on him, protecting the pure notion of “truth” and the way it reproduces its own “passivity” that is constituent of Orientalism and of representation by and large. While the textual academic debate on Orientalism remains stuck in a deadlock of mutual accusations of deliberate distortion, Orientalism itself continues in the melange of truth and fiction, across the images that dominate and shape our world, strategically making use of the blur of categories to defend itself against such criticism. Seeing Orientalism as a representational system, where the category and a mode of suitability is what determines whether something is in or out, sheds a new light on the power of this reproductive social system of expectations. By drawing upon the aesthetics of Orientalism, building upon theorists of the image, like Jacques Rancière, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Jean Baudrillard, this thesis aims to update Said’s theory by returning Orientalism to its image-based nature, and by looking at the ways in which an image has the capacity to structure a history of divisions, and to highlight the ways in which this continuity is achieved and how it is maintained in the new world of moving images, to affect the same binarism that constructs its own passive subjectivity.
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Boswell, Timothy. "After the Planes." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2012. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc115051/.
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The dissertation consists of a critical preface and a novel. The preface analyzes what it terms “polyvocal” novels, or novels employing multiple points of view, as well as “layered storytelling,” or layers of textuality within novels, such as stories within stories. Specifically, the first part of the preface discusses polyvocality in twenty-first century American novels, while the second part explores layered storytelling in novels responding to World War II or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The preface analyzes the advantages and difficulties connected to these techniques, as well as their aptitude for reflecting the fractured, disconnected, and subjective nature of the narratives we construct to interpret traumatic experiences. It also acknowledges the necessity—despite its inherent limitations—of using language to engage with this fragmentation and cope with its challenges. The preface uses numerous novels as examples and case studies, and it also explores these concepts and techniques in relation to the process of writing the novel After the Planes. After the Planes depicts multiple generations of a family who utilize storytelling as a means to work through grief, hurt, misunderstanding, and loss—whether from interpersonal conflicts or from war. Against her father’s wishes, a young woman moves in with her nearly-unknown grandfather, struggling to understand the rifts in her family and how they have shaped her own identity. She reads a book sent to her by her father, which turns out to be his story of growing up in the years following World War II. The book was intercepted and emended by her grandfather, who inserts his own commentary throughout, complicating her father’s hopes of reconciliation. The novel moves between two main narratives, one set primarily in 1951 and the other in the days and weeks immediately prior to September 11, 2001.
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Nouar, Adel. "Le 11 septembre et la fiction américaine : écritures d'un contre-récit." Thesis, Aix-Marseille, 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019AIXM0097.
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Les attentats du 11septembre 2001,qui ont visé l’Amérique mais dont la ville de New York a payé le plus lourd tribut,ont laissé le pays sans voix. Très vite, les auteurs de fictions ont été sollicités pour apporter un semblant de sens aux attaques les plus dévastatrices jamais perpétrées contre l’Amérique, sur son propre sol. Don DeLillo,le premier, répond à cet appel en publiant dès le lendemain des attaques un essai qui esquisse les contours de la résistance littéraire au terrorisme mais également au triomphalisme guerrier d’une Amérique qui a érigé son deuil en un discours normé contre lequel toute démarcation relevait du blasphème antipatriotique. Le contre-récit que DeLillo appelle de ses vœux dans «In the Ruins of the Future» offre ainsi la possibilité à la littérature de prendre pleinement part à l’écriture du 11 septembre qui a donné le jour à une fiction dite «post-11septembre» d’une grande variété que cette thèse propose de sonder à travers l’analyse d’un large corpus d’œuvres. De la reconquête de la ville meurtrie à la réinterprétation de l’histoire nationale, jusqu’à la redéfinition du rapport de l’Amérique avec le reste du monde, le contre-récit littéraire au 11 septembre nourrit un questionnement éthique sur les pouvoirs de la fiction, inscrivant cette étude dans la vaste recherche d’éléments de réponse à la question «Que peut la littérature?»The terrorist attacks that targeted America on September 11, 2001,and whose price was paid by NewYork city in the harshest and bloodiest way,left the country speechless, at loss for words. Soon, authors of fiction were asked to providea semblance of meaning for the worst attacks ever launched on American soil. Don DeLillo was the first writer to answer this call by publishing an essay on the very next day following the attacks that frames where the literaryresponse, and that of fictionmore specifically, to9/11 should begin. The challenge facingthe writers of fiction was to opposeboth terrorism and the belligerent triumphalism of an America that had turned its mourning into a normative discourse from which the slightest deviation was deemed unpatriotic. The counternarrative thus called for by DeLillo in «In the Ruins of the Future» gave literature the opportunity to fully take part into the writing of 9/11. Such an endeavour gave birth to what was soon labelled «post-9/11 fiction» and characterised by a great diversity that this study seeks to sample. From reclaiming the wounded city, to reinterpreting American history, all the way to redefining America’s relationship with the rest of the world, the counternarrative provides the occasion to reflect upon the powers of fiction, making this study take part into a largerdebate over“What can literature do?”
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Aydogdu, Zeynep. "Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1557191593344128.
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Maloul, Linda Fawzi. "From immigrant narratives to ethnic literature : the contemporary fiction of Arab British and Arab American women writers." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.647377.
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The purpose of this thesis is to firmly situate the fictions of contemporary Arab British and Arab American women writers who write in English within the corpus of ethnic and mainstream literary criticism. I aim to position these fictions within their historical and sociopolitical contexts. I also aim to shift the focus from the texts’ female protagonists to male and minor characters in order to explore how the writers construct both political Islam and Islam as a private faith; how they construct Palestinian Muslim masculinities; and how they respond to the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror. I argue that these fictions offer some of the most astute reactions to the events of 9/11 and their repercussions. I also argue that Arab American literature in general and Arab American women’s literature in particular is more canny than its Arab British counterpart. Thus, I aim to show how Arab American literary productions refract a development from the literature of self-exploration to that of transformation allowing them a well-deserved spot in Ethnic-American literary studies and in time, mainstream American literary studies. Another of my aims is to investigate how Arab American and Arab British writers highlight the diversity of Arabs, Muslims and Islam, thus addressing essentialist reductions of Arabs and Muslims as a monolithic group. In chapter one, I investigate how Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret negotiate issues such as Islamic clothing. I also question anew Arab women writers’ perceived role as “cultural commentators.” In chapter two, I explore how Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home construct Palestinian Muslim masculinities, and how they challenge the Anglo-American stereotypical representations of Arab Muslim masculinity. In chapter three, I analyse how Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land, Frances Khirallah Noble’s The New Belly Dancer of the Galaxy and Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter negotiate cultural, political and social views of America. I aim to examine whether Halaby, Noble and Yunis’ ambiguous position, as legally ‘white’ citizens who are also members of a marginalized and religiously racialized minority, offers them a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ In the conclusion, I offer some suggestions for future research.
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Albala, Razan. "Towards an ethics of post-9/11 fiction : a reading of Ian McEwan's Saturday, Don DeLillo's Falling man, and Mohsin Hamid's The reluctant fundamentalist." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.625452.
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Resano, Dolores. "Of heroes and victims: Jess Walter’s The Zero and the satirical post-9/11 novel." Doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/458996.
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This dissertation analyzes a typically overlooked novel within the corpus of post-9/11 fiction studies, Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006), and puts forward some hypotheses for this under-examination. It suggests that the debates that arose in the United States in the wake of 9/11—regarding the status of fiction in the face of tragedy, the theses about the demise of irony and satire, the high expectations put on canonical authors to give meaning to the event, and standardized interpretations of what a “good 9/11 novel” should be—all contributed to construct readings of The Zero that fell within the somewhat prescriptive approaches established by the first wave of post-9/11 fiction studies, and thus overlooked the subversive potential of Walter's novel. While recent academic output is starting to explore The Zero in innovative ways, early reception of the novel failed to examine it conceptually and formally, favoring as it did a trauma studies approach that resulted in a bland analysis of the discursive exploration that the novel carries out. On the other hand, the novel’s use of satirical humor has been mostly ignored, and this is partly explained by the currency of outdated theoretical conceptions of what constitutes a satirical novel. Therefore, this dissertation carries out a revision of the theoretical corpus on narrative satire and proposes its renewal through the theories of carnivalization of Mikhail Bakhtin. Approaching the novel through the notions of satirical carnival, dialogism, and intertextuality reveals how satire is a very effective way of exploring and questioning the discursive apparatus that mobilized in the United States after the attacks. Such is the object of the novel, the interaction with, the representation and the eventual subversion of a nationalist discourse that was underpinned by its appeal to foundational myths and cultural themes and that was highly accepted by the general population, which allowed the Bush administration to respond to the attacks in military terms and to suspend certain rights and freedoms on the domestic front, under the premise of promoting security. This dissertation seeks to demonstrate how satire understood this way is especially suited for constructing a dialogical, polyphonic and inquisitive narrative that not only questions but also dialogues with the American nation after 9/11.La presente tesis explora una novela poco estudiada del corpus de ficción post-11-S, The Zero (2006), de Jess Walter, y propone algunas hipótesis que puedan explicar esta falta de atención. Se sugiere que los debates que se originaron en los Estados Unidos tras el 11-S—respecto al estatus de la ficción frente a la tragedia, la supuesta falta de adecuación del humor satírico e irónico para explicarla, las grandes expectativas depositadas en los autores canónicos para que dieran sentido al hecho, y las interpretaciones un tanto prescriptivas y normativas por parte del campo de los “post- 9/11 fiction studies”—contribuyeron a determinar ciertas lecturas de The Zero dentro de los parámetros establecidos por la primera ola de ficción post-11-S, pasando por alto el potencial subversivo de la novela de Walter. La recepción temprana de la novela ha tendido a desatender el análisis formal y conceptual de The Zero al favorecer una aproximación desde los estudios del trauma que resulta en un análisis insustancial de la exploración discursiva que la novela lleva a cabo. Por otra parte, se ha ignorado casi por completo su uso del humor satírico, y ello en parte se explica por ciertas concepciones teóricas un tanto parciales y anticuadas sobre qué es una novela satírica. Por lo tanto, la tesis lleva a cabo una revisión del corpus teórico sobre la sátira narrativa y propone su renovación a través de las teorías de carnivalización de Mikhail Bakhtin. La aproximación a la novela desde las nociones de carnaval satírico, dialogismo, e intertextualidad revela como la sátira es un modo muy efectivo de explorar y cuestionar el aparato discursivo que se movilizó en Estados Unidos tras los atentados. Tal es el objeto de la novela, la interacción con, representación y eventual subversión de un discurso nacionalista que se sostuvo por la apelación a mitos fundacionales y temas culturales de alta aceptación entre la población, lo cual permitió una respuesta militar y el abandono de ciertas libertades en el frente doméstico con el fin de garantizar la seguridad. La tesis busca demostrar como la sátira entendida de este modo es especialmente idónea para construir un relato dialógico, polifónico e inquisidor que no solo cuestione sino que dialogue con la nación estadounidense tras el 11-S.
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Lipschultz, Geri. "Grace Before the Fall." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1335966906.
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Liao, Pei-Chen, and 廖培真. "Of Violence and Identity:“Post”-9/11 South Asian British Fiction." Thesis, 2009. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/98644273335973986858.
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博士國立臺灣大學
外國語文學研究所
97
The use of the prefix “post” in the dominant post-9/11 discourse is problematic. Firstly, it indicates a linear development from “pre-9/11,” “9/11,” to “post-9/11,” rendering the “pre-9/11” period a history of American innocence and “post-9/11” an era in which American confidence and security is being recovered and rebuilt. Secondly, the binary axis of time undercuts the tension in the binary axis of power—counter-terrorist vs. the terrorist, although the dichotomy is inadequately nuanced, as in the case of the Cold War. Thirdly, the term “post-9/11” hints at the presumption that 9/11 is not only a major world event but the determining marker of the twenty-first century, to which the world’s multitudinous cultures and countries are subordinated. Fourthly, “the” post-9/11 condition reduces multiplicity to singularity. Under the condition, the world is seen simply in terms of terrorism and anti-terrorism, and violence and conflict in its multiple forms are comparatively treated with indifference. My dissertation thus uses the term “post”-9/11 “under erasure.” Reading four “post”-9/11 South Asian British novels, my dissertation is engaged with Orientalism, postcolonial and globalization theories, and South Asian cultural studies. It has two aims. At a smaller level, it endeavors to expose the violence of American benign imperialism and Western narcissism. The novels include Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005), Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). These novels are “post”-9/11 because they are concerned with and written in the aftermath of 9/11, yet they are pre-9/11 and anti-9/11, too. While representing the uncanniness of 9/11 and the global and violent impacts of the war on terror, these South Asian British writers reach beyond the politics of dating 9/11, delineate the “unhomely” migrant experience, and attend to the diversity of the “post”-9/11 by admitting local and regional specificity. At a broader and more complicated level, my dissertation aims to underscore the ambivalent link between violence and identity in terms of religion, community, culture, nation, civilization, class, or gender. The multiple journeys, identities, and experiences of the (im)migrant characters allow the novelists to explore transnationally and transculturally in their narratives the connection of the violence inherent in 9/11 and the war on terror with sexual and racial discrimination, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, anti-immigration movement, and global capitalism.
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Mansutti, Pamela. "Trauma and Beyond: Ethical and Cultural Constructions of 9/11 in American Fiction." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/6799.
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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 Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). 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 politics, a rhetorical mode in which both discourses are essentially closed, non-hermeneutic, and rooted in the same rationale: exploiting 9/11 for consensus. On the contrary, in what I call the New-Yorkization of 9/11, I highlighted how the situatedness of the public discourses that New Yorkers constructed to tell their own tragedy rescues the Ur-Phaenomenon of 9/11 from the epistemological commodification that intellectual, mediatic and political interpretations forced on it. Furthermore, pointing to the speciousness of arguments that deem 9/11 literature sentimental and unimaginative, I claim that the traumatic literature on the attacks constitutes an example of ethical practice, since it originates from witnesses of the catastrophe, it represents communal solidarity, and it places a crucial demand on the reader as an empathic listener and ethical agent. Ethical counternarratives oppose the ideological simplification of the 9/11 attacks and develop instead a complex counter-rhetoric of emotions and inclusiveness that we could read as a particular instantiation of an ethics of the self and “Other.”
As much as the 9/11 “ethical” novels suggest that “survivability” in times of trauma depends on “relationality” (J. Butler), the “cultural” ones unveil the insensitivity and superficiality of the actual US society far away from the site of trauma. The binary framework I use implies that, outside of New York City, 9/11 is narrated neither traumatically (in terms of literary form), nor as trauma (in terms of textual fact). Consequently, on the basis of a spatial criterion and in parallel to the ethical novels, I have identified a category of “cultural” fiction that tackles the events of 9/11 at a distance, spatially and conceptually. In essence, 9/11 brings neither shock, nor promise of regeneration to these peripheral settings, except for Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a story in which we are returned to a post-9/11 New York where different ethnic subjects can re-negotiate creatively their identities. The cultural novels are ultimately pervaded by a mode of tragic irony that is unthinkable for the ethical novels and that is used in these texts to convey the inanity and hubris of a politically uneducated and naïve America – one that has difficulties to point Afghanistan on a map, or to transcend dualistic schemes of value that embody precisely Bush’s Manichaeism. The potential for cultural pluralism, solidarity and historical memory set up by the New York stories does not ramify into the America that is far away from the neuralgic epicenter of historical trauma. This proves that the traumatizing effects and the related ethical calls engendered by 9/11 remain confined to the New York literature on the topic.
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Conley, Richard. "Representing the Past and Future Post-9/11 Manhattan: Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin as Disavowing Fiction." 2014. http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses/166.
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Jonathan Lethem’s 2009 novel Chronic City and Colum McCann’s 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin can each be read as unique forms of the post-9/11 novel. In this study, I take up the argument that much of the established scholarship analyzing post-9/11 fiction often examines the same set of texts and frequently employs similar theoretical lenses, more often than not a specific form of trauma analysis. I argue that McCann and Lethem’s novels can each be read as unique forms of the post-9/11 novel for the way each work incorporates the Freudian processes of fetishism and disavowal into their respective narratives. In two close readings, I analyze each text to demonstrate how these processes function and what they offer both the authors and readers of the novels.
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Bone, Ian. "Snap shot: a novel with accompanying exegesis Snap shot: September 11, 2001, engaging with the ongoing narrative of fear." 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/49170.
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'Snap Shot' is a Young Adult novel centred around two main characters – 16 year-old Bel and her older step-sister, Diane, who was living in New York on September 11, 2001. The novel begins with a bus crash on a city freeway, and the narrator, who we later learn is Bel, unfolds the story that leads up to the crash. There are many plotlines that run through the novel, narrated in a variety of voices by Bel. She tells the story of her step-sister, who witnessed the September 11 attack from a distance (in Queens). She reveals her sister's story in the weeks following the attack. Diane is inspired by the image of one of the victims of the attack, a woman named Sena. She sees her photo in one of the desperate fliers that popped up around the city after the attack, and recognises a bracelet the woman is wearing as similar to one owned by her mother. Diane acts on an impulsive idea to somehow bring redemption to the family of this woman by creating a false photograph of the bracelet at Ground Zero, but she is detained by the National Guard. This is an incident that leads to her mother's decision to return to Australia to live. Back in Australia, Diane makes contact with her father, who is distant and dishonest with her. Diane asks to see her younger step-sister, Bel, but she is met with strong resistance. It is obvious that she is being kept from her sister. Bel also learns that her step-sister is back, but her attempts to make contact are blocked by her parents. Eventually the two sisters get together, and the younger forms a fascination and powerful admiration for her older sister, who is now a photographer. She takes images of men she has never met and posts them on her website with emotive labels such as 'victim' or 'terrorist'. Bel's fascination with her older sister leads her to want to emulate her. She sets out to take a photograph of a stranger, and stalks a young man for two days, working up the courage to approach him and interact with him. The fact that she wants to interact with her subject creates tension with her sister, who never speaks with her subjects. They argue about Bel's safety and Diane's courage. Bel eventually approaches the young man, Robert, and forms a connection with him. The coming together of these three characters sets in motion an idea, impulsive and provocative, driven by Bel, to create an artificial moment of terror on a bus as a means to shock the passengers and shake them from a 'dream'. This story is told through counter-voices that offer harmony and dissonance, and at times perspective, to the unfolding plotline. There is Shahrazade, an evocation of Bel's imagination, who is the ultimate in the courageous storyteller. Shahrazade uses narrative to divert her audience away from murderous revenge and into empathic connection. There are the short passages depicting the moments in the bus from the points of view of several passengers. There are the chapters where Bel is interrogated by two police officers, who slowly slide from being realistic characters to figments of Bel's overactive imagination. At the beginning of the novel, Bel tells the reader, 'You are witness to a tragedy, but you don’t call it that.' (Bone 2008) By the end, the verdict is left open. Are the three guilty of creating terror on the bus? Was it a tragedy? Is there redemption in the act of telling a story? The exegetical component of this thesis explores the social, literary and political context of the writing of 'Snap Shot'. It is in three parts, predicated on my research enquiry about the nature of the world we now live in post-September 11, a day that was supposed to have changed history. I explore whether there is a consistent and unified narrative that, as members of the public, we are engaging with. I look at the use of fear by the terrorists, and explore how this fear has manifested itself post-September 11. I ask whether there is an ongoing narrative of fear, and if so, what is its nature? How is it perpetuated? How does the public engage with this narrative? And what implications does this have for the writing of 'Snap Shot'? I explore literary and artistic responses to September 11, and explore the role of the artist as provocateur. What are the taboos and sore points that provocative art can touch on when looking at the subject of the world that has emerged post-September 11? The exegesis also explores how fear and terror are communicated, with a particular reference to symbolism and frames. What imaginings emerged from the subterranean consciousness prior to September 11, and what imaginings are at play today? Significantly, I explore what implications this imagination has for communicating an anti-terrorism message within the context of writing 'Snap Shot'.Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008
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Olehla, Richard. "Apokalypsa jako zjevení pravdy v moderním americkém románu: Thomas Pynchon a román po 11. září." Doctoral thesis, 2011. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-299482.
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English summary This dissertation focuses on the apocalyptic fiction of Thomas Pynchon and analyses various representations of the apocalypse as "revelation" or "unveiling of truth" in its various aspects and manifestations (i.e. paranoia, angels, etc.) in the novels V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. The theme of apocalypse as a revelation concerning the true nature of the world has a key role to play in the above mentioned novels as well as significance for Pynchon's protagonists. This is so despite the fact that such revelation is depicted as illusory and mostly unattainable, since these novels are all based on the premise that there is no ultimate truth, and therefore, there is nothing that can be revealed. Pynchon's characters get only a revelation of individual truth, and thus theirs is a private apocalypse. When analysing the role of the apocalypse in Western culture, it is also important to analyse the role of millenarian expectations as well as the supposed communication process between God and people, a process depicted as being mediated by angels. The interpretation of God's message can never be precise and perfect, since its meaning is distorted during the communication process. On the rhetorical level, this distortion is equal to metaphor, which in turn causes feelings of paranoia...
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(8850251), Ghaleb Alomaish. "“DOUBLE REFRACTION”: IMAGE PROJECTION AND PERCEPTION IN SAUDI-AMERICAN CONTEXTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY." Thesis, 2020.
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This dissertation aims to create a scholarly space where a seventy-five-year-old “special relationship” (1945-2020) between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States is examined from an interdisciplinary comparativist perspective. I posit that a comparative study of Saudi and American fiction goes beyond the limitedness of global geopolitics and proves to uncover some new literary, sociocultural, and historical dimensions of this long history, while shedding some light on others. Saudi writers creatively challenge the inherently static and monolithic image of Saudi Arabia, its culture and people in the West. They also simultaneously unsettle the notion of homogeneity and enable us to gain new insight into self-perception within the local Saudi context by offering a wide scope of genuine engagements with distinctive themes ranging from spatiality, identity, ethnicity, and gender to slavery, religiosity and (post)modernity. On the other side, American authors still show some signs of ambivalence towards the depiction of the Saudi (Muslim/Arab) Other, but they nonetheless also demonstrate serious effort to emancipate their representations from the confining legacy of (neo)Orientalist discourse and oil politics by tackling the concepts of race, alterity, hegemony, radicalism, nomadism and (un)belonging.