Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror"

Trauma and Fictions of the Author: Sarah O'Brien
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000386422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which transnational fiction in the post-9/11 era can intervene in discourse surrounding the "war on terror" to advocate for marginalised perspectives. Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror" conceptualises global political discourse about the "war on terror" as incongruous, with transnational memory frames instituted in Western nations centralising 9/11 as uniquely traumatic, excluding the historical and present-day experiences of Afghans under Western—specifically American—hegemonic violence. Recent developments in trauma studies explain how dominant Western trauma theory participates in this exclusion, failing to account for the ongoing suffering common to non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. O’Brien explores how Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Nadeem Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, The Blind Man’s Garden), and Kamila Shamsie (Burnt Shadows) represent marginalised perspectives in the context of the "war on terror".

Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror"

Trauma and Fictions of the Author: Sarah O'Brien
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000386422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores the ways in which transnational fiction in the post-9/11 era can intervene in discourse surrounding the "war on terror" to advocate for marginalised perspectives. Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror" conceptualises global political discourse about the "war on terror" as incongruous, with transnational memory frames instituted in Western nations centralising 9/11 as uniquely traumatic, excluding the historical and present-day experiences of Afghans under Western—specifically American—hegemonic violence. Recent developments in trauma studies explain how dominant Western trauma theory participates in this exclusion, failing to account for the ongoing suffering common to non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. O’Brien explores how Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Nadeem Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, The Blind Man’s Garden), and Kamila Shamsie (Burnt Shadows) represent marginalised perspectives in the context of the "war on terror".

Reflecting 9/11

Reflecting 9/11 PDF Author: Heather Pope
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443896640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
In over fifteen years, the cultural and artistic response to 9/11 has been wide-ranging in form and function. As the turbulent post-9/11 years have unfolded – years that have been shaped and characterized by the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, 7/7, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay – these texts have been commemorative and heroic, have attempted to work through collective and individual traumas, and have struggled with trying to represent the “terrorist other.” Many of these earlier domestic, heroic and traumatic works have so often been read as limitations in narrative. This collection, however, challenges the language of limitation and provides re-readings of earlier work, but also traces the emergence of a new paradigm for discussing the artistic responses to 9/11 – one that frames these narratives as dialogic, self-conscious and self-reflexive interventions in the responses to the attacks, the initial representations of the attacks, and the ever-shifting social and geopolitical continuities of the 9/11 decade. These texts widen the conversation about the lasting impacts of 9/11, and incorporate strands of discussion on American exceptionalism and imperialism, torture, and otherness, whilst still remaining invested in the personal and collective traumas of the attacks. The authors included here ask crucial questions about the way 9/11 is being historicized: will it, for example, be read as a moment of rupture or epoch? Will it inevitably be attached to the War on Terror or the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? As they trace the emergent patterns of reflexivity, politicization and dissent, the contributions here are also implicitly invested in asking how far they extend.

Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11

Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11 PDF Author: Christina Cavedon
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900430598X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Applying melancholia as an analytical concept, Christina Cavedon’s Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11 discusses novels by Jay McInerney and Don DeLillo in light of an American cultural malaise pre-dating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Fictions of the War on Terror

Fictions of the War on Terror PDF Author: D. O'Gorman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137506180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book argues that there are a number of contemporary novels that challenge the reductive 'us and them' binaries that have been prevalent not only in politics and the global media since 9/11, but also in many works within the emerging genre of '9/11 fiction' itself.

The Blind Man's Garden

The Blind Man's Garden PDF Author: Nadeem Aslam
Publisher: Random House India
ISBN: 8184003919
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
‘Love is not consolation, it is light’ From the author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil comes a novel set in the months after 9/11, when Western armies invaded Afghanistan—a story of love, hope and grief, of uncorrupted faith and of what it means to be alive. Jeo and his foster-brother Mikal leave their home in Pakistan to help care for wounded Afghans. Within hours of entering the wide-horizoned Afghan landscape, Mikal and Jeo are separated and, emerging from the carnage, Mikal begins his search for Jeo. But his deepest wish is to return home—to the young woman he loves and who loves him, Jeo’s wife. The Blind Man’s Garden maps a place both phantasmally beautiful and chilling. Taking us on a journey from Al Qaeda’s hideouts in Waziristan and American-built military prisons to a family left behind—Mikal’s and Jeo’s blind, regretful father, Jeo’s resolute wife and her superstitious mother—it unflinchingly examines war and brotherhood, devastation, separation and remorse, while celebrating the redemptive power of nature, art and literature.

Cultures of War in Graphic Novels

Cultures of War in Graphic Novels PDF Author: Tatiana Prorokova
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 081359099X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Cultures of War in Graphic Novels examines the representation of small-scale and often less acknowledged conflicts from around the world and throughout history. The contributors look at an array of graphic novels about conflicts such as the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), the Irish struggle for national independence (1916-1998), the Falkland War (1982), the Bosnian War (1992-1995), the Rwandan genocide (1994), the Israel-Lebanon War (2006), and the War on Terror (2001-). The book explores the multi-layered relation between the graphic novel as a popular medium and war as a pivotal recurring experience in human history. The focus on largely overlooked small-scale conflicts contributes not only to advance our understanding of graphic novels about war and the cultural aspects of war as reflected in graphic novels, but also our sense of the early twenty-first century, in which popular media and limited conflicts have become closely interrelated.

Literature after 9/11

Literature after 9/11 PDF Author: Ann Keniston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135024669
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
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.

The 9/11 Novel

The 9/11 Novel PDF Author: Arin Keeble
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476615624
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive study of the first decade of literary representations of 9/11, moving from Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers (2003) to Amy Waldman's The Submission (2012). It traces the way literature has dealt with an event that continues to shape world conflict and resonate prominently in the American imagination, and argues that the corpus of literary fiction discussing 9/11 is characterized by a fundamental sense of conflictedness related to the tensions between trauma or mourning and political imperatives. The work offers in-depth analyses of texts that have historicized 9/11 and shaped the way we understand this key moment in American and world history.

Docu-Fictions of War

Docu-Fictions of War PDF Author: Tatiana Prorokova
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496214463
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Historical writing and fiction are not the same thing, though historians often creatively manipulate material in imposing plot structures, selecting starting and ending points, and fashioning compelling literary characters from historical figures. In Docu-Fictions of War, Tatiana Prorokova argues that the opposite is also true—war fiction offers a kind of history that both documents its subjects and provides a snapshot of the cultural representation of the United States’ most recent military involvements. She covers a largely neglected body of cinematic and literary texts about the First Gulf War, the Balkan War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War to open a fresh analysis of cultural texts on war. Prorokova contends that these texts are not pure fiction, but “docu-fictions”—works of imagination that can document their subjects while disclosing the social, political, and historical link between war and culture during the last three decades. Docu-Fictions of War analyzes how these representational narratives have highlighted a humanitarian rationale behind American involvement in each war, whether the stated goals were to free the oppressed from tyranny, stop genocide, or rid the world of terrorism. The book explores the gap between history—what allegedly happened—and the cultural mythology that is both true and inexact, tangible and sensed, recognized and undocumented.

The post-9/11 novel as a political and literary trauma. Fact and fiction in Mohsin Hamid's novel "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"

The post-9/11 novel as a political and literary trauma. Fact and fiction in Mohsin Hamid's novel Author: Matthias Dickert
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668315930
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 51

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Book Description
Scientific Essay from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, Comenius University in Bratislava, language: English, abstract: It has now been fifteen years since America and the world were hit by a terror attack of a new and unknown quality. The Muslim terrorists belonging to Bin Laden's terror network Al- Qaida who hijacked several planes to use them as lethal weapons against America and her symbolic role as the country of freedom and democracy started a new era of political, social and religious uproar and chaos inexperienced so far. This chaos expressed itself not only in the Gulf Wars that were to follow or the ongoing wars in Lybia, Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan and the migration waves to Europe as a result from all this it also paved the way for a literary embodiment of 9/11 as a literary element which has found a fixed place within migrant writing in the widest sense and Muslim writing in particular. The fact that writers from East (and West) incorporated this key date into their novels threw light on the fact that 9/11 did not only function as a global, national, collective, religious or individual trauma it also showed its widespread application for plot, character, constellations, speech and reception of many authors. The introduction and employment of 9/11 into contemporary literature slowly but steadily showed its ongoing importance for contemporary writing. In 2007 the newspaper USA Today declared on a headline that 'Novels about 9/11 can't stack up to non -fiction' thus throwing light at the multiple use of it as a narrative element. In 2015 an editor for The New York Times Book Review suited that the necessity for a 9/11 novel goes on because it reflects 'a new age of terror'. The fact that 9/11 is a widely used element of Muslim writing shows that it is this group of contemporary novelists who are aware of its manifold use for literature. Literature is, however, always a reflection of social, political and religious conditions and it is exactly this link which is of special interest here. The author of this text therefore first of all gives a general introduction into 9/11 before he tries to reflect in with Muslim writing and the post-9/11 novel thus throwing light on the close link between both sides and the literary conequences resulting from this. This will be done with the help of Mohsin Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) which has by now been accepted as a masterpiece of this new genre.