Drawing on trauma theory, genre theory, political theory, and theories of postmodernity, space, and temporality, Literature After 9/11 suggests ways that these often distinct discourses can be recombined and set into dialogue with one another as it explores 9/11’s effects on literature and literature’s attempts to convey 9/11.
Author(s): Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn
Series: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature, 1
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2008
Language: English
Tags: 9/11, Literature, Literary Criticism
Cover
Literature after 9/11
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Representing 9/11: Literature and Resistance
PART 1 Experiencing 9/11: Time, Trauma, and the Incommensurable Event
1 Portraits of Grief: Telling Details and the New Genres of Testimony
2 Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11’s Timely Traumas
3 Graphic Implosion: Politics, Time, and Value in Post-9/11 Comics
4 “Sometimes things disappear”: Absence and Mutability in Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York
5 Witnessing 9/11: Art Spiegelman and the Persistence of Trauma
PART 2 9/11 Politics and Representation
6 Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private in Post-9/11 Literature
7 “We’re Not a Friggin’ Girl Band”: September 11, Masculinity, and the British-American Relationship in David Hare’s Stuff Happens and Ian McEwan’s Saturday
8 “We’re the Culture That Cried Wolf”: Discourse and Terrorism in Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby
9 Still Life: 9/11’s Falling Bodies
PART 3 9/11 and the Literary Tradition
10 Telling It Like It Isn’t
11 Portraits 9/11/01: The New York Times and the Pornography of Grief
12 Theater after 9/11
13 Real Planes and Imaginary Towers: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America as 9/11 Prosthetic Screen
14 Precocious Testimony: Poetry and the Uncommemorable
Afterword: Imagination and Monstrosity
Contributors
Index
