Narrative Innovation in 9/11 Fiction

Narrative Innovation in 9/11 Fiction PDF Author:
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401211892
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Narrative Innovation in 9/11 Fiction explores fiction that experiments in innovative ways with formal strategies so as to engage with the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and their repercussion. This study demonstrates how certain novels create narratives about the 9/11 attacks that refuse to shy away from exploring and representing their difficult and problematic aspects and, in fact, insist on doing so as the only means of coming to terms with the events in all their cultural and historical specificity. As such, these texts implicitly advocate a notion of literature as a dynamic negotiation of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, politics, culture, and history. Indeed, they assert and reassert the viability of literature as a mode of critical inquiry that can engage and contribute to the socio-political debates of its time and to the construction of narratives about significant historical and cultural events.

Narrative Innovation in 9/11 Fiction

Narrative Innovation in 9/11 Fiction PDF Author:
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401211892
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
Narrative Innovation in 9/11 Fiction explores fiction that experiments in innovative ways with formal strategies so as to engage with the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and their repercussion. This study demonstrates how certain novels create narratives about the 9/11 attacks that refuse to shy away from exploring and representing their difficult and problematic aspects and, in fact, insist on doing so as the only means of coming to terms with the events in all their cultural and historical specificity. As such, these texts implicitly advocate a notion of literature as a dynamic negotiation of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, politics, culture, and history. Indeed, they assert and reassert the viability of literature as a mode of critical inquiry that can engage and contribute to the socio-political debates of its time and to the construction of narratives about significant historical and cultural events.

Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity

Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004324224
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity, edited by Dunja M. Mohr and Birgit Däwes, explores the intersections between narrative disruption and continuity in post-9/11 narratives from an interdisciplinary transnational perspective, foregrounding the transatlantic cultural memory of 9/11. Contesting the earlier notion of a cataclysm that has changed ‘everything,’ and critically reflecting on American exceptionalism, the collection offers an inquiry into what has gone unchanged in terms of pre-9/11, post-9/11, and post-post-9/11 issues and what silences persist. How do literature and performative and visual arts negotiate this precarious balance of a pervasive discourse of change and emerging patterns of political, ideological, and cultural continuity?

Narratives of the War on Terror

Narratives of the War on Terror PDF Author: Michael C. Frank
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000073750
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Challenging the predominantly Euro-American approaches to the field, this volume brings together essays on a wide array of literary, filmic and journalistic responses to the decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Shifting the focus from so-called 9/11 literature to narratives of the war on terror, and from the transatlantic world to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the Afghan-Pak border region, South Waziristan, Al-Andalus and Kenya, the book captures the multiple transnational reverberations of the discourses on terrorism, counter-terrorism and insurgency. These include, but are not restricted to, the realignment of geopolitical power relations; the formation of new terrorist networks (ISIS) and regional alliances (Iraq/Syria); the growing number of terrorist incidents in the West; the changing discourses on security and technologies of warfare; and the leveraging of fundamental constitutional principles. The essays featured in this volume draw upon, and critically engage with, the conceptual trajectories within American literary debates, postcolonial discourse and transatlantic literary criticism. Collectively, they move away from the trauma-centrism and residual US-centrism of early literary responses to 9/11 and the criticism thereon, while responding to postcolonial theory’s call for a historical foregrounding of terrorism, insurgency and armed violence in the colonial-imperial power nexus. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

9/11 Gothic

9/11 Gothic PDF Author: Danel Olson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793638330
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, 9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels returns to the ruins and anguish of 9/11 to pose a question not yet addressed by scholarship. Two time World Fantasy Award-winning writer Danel Olson asks how, why, and where New York City novels capture the terror of the Al-Qaeda mass murders through a supernatural lens. This book explores ghostly presences from the world’s largest crime scene in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Griffin Hansbury, and Patrick McGrath—all of whom have been called writers of Gotham. Arguing how theories on trauma and the Gothic can combine to explain ghostly encounters civilian survivors experience in fiction, Olson shares what those eerie meetings express about grief, guilt, love, memory, sex, and suicidal urges. This book also explores why and how paths to recovery open for these ghost-visited survivors in the fiction of catastrophe from the early twenty-first century.

The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film

The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film PDF Author: Michael Frank
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134837364
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This study investigates the overlaps between political discourse and literary and cinematic fiction, arguing that both are informed by, and contribute to, the cultural imaginary of terrorism. Whenever mass-mediated acts of terrorism occur, they tend to trigger a proliferation of threat scenarios not only in the realm of literature and film but also in the statements of policymakers, security experts, and journalists. In the process, the discursive boundary between the factual and the speculative can become difficult to discern. To elucidate this phenomenon, this book proposes that terror is a halfway house between the real and the imaginary. For what characterizes terrorism is less the single act of violence than it is the fact that this act is perceived to be the beginning, or part, of a potential series, and that further acts are expected to occur. As turn-of-the-century writers such as Stevenson and Conrad were the first to point out, this gives terror a fantastical dimension, a fact reinforced by the clandestine nature of both terrorist and counter-terrorist operations. Supported by contextual readings of selected texts and films from The Dynamiter and The Secret Agent through late-Victorian science fiction to post-9/11 novels and cinema, this study explores the complex interplay between actual incidents of political violence, the surrounding discourse, and fictional engagement with the issue to show how terrorism becomes an object of fantasy. Drawing on research from a variety of disciplines, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism will be a valuable resource for those with interests in the areas of Literature and Film, Terrorism Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Trauma Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After

Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After PDF Author: M. Cornis-Pope
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403970033
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting undertakes a systematic study of postmodernism's responses to the polarized ideologies of the postwar period that have held cultures hostage to a confrontation between rival ideologies abroad and a clash between champions of uniformity and disruptive others at home. Considering a broad range of narrative projects and approaches (from polysystemic fiction to surfiction, postmodern feminism, and multicultural/postcolonial fiction), this book highlights their solutions to ontological division (real vs. imaginary, wordly and other-worldly), sociocultural oppositions (of race, class, gender) and narratological dualities (imitation vs. invention, realism vs. formalism). A thorough rereading of the best experimental work published in the US since the mid-1960s reveals the fact that innovative fiction has been from the beginning concerned with redefining the relationship between history and fiction, narrative and cultural articulation. Stepping back from traditional polarizations, innovative novelists have tried to envision an alternative history of irreducible particularities, excluded middles, and creative intercrossings.

Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction PDF Author: Eva Ries
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311076752X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Even though the literary trope of the flâneur has been proclaimed ‘dead’ on several occasions, it still proves particularly lively in contemporary Anglophone fiction. This study investigates how flânerie takes a belated ‘ethical turn’ in its more recent manifestations by negotiating models of ethical subjectivity. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s writings on the ‘aesthetics of existence’ as well as Judith Butler’s notion of precariousness as conditio humana, it establishes a link between post-sovereign models of subject formation and a paradoxical constellation of flânerie, which surfaces most prominently in the work of Walter Benjamin. By means of detailed readings of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold, Teju Cole’s Open City, Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, Or a Way to Lose More Slowly, this book traces how the ambivalence of flânerie and its textual representation produces ethical norms while at the same time propagating the value of difference by means of disrupting societal norms of sameness. Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction thus shows that the flânerie text becomes a medium of ethical critique in post-postmodern times.

New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel

New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel PDF Author: Sibylle Baumbach
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030325989
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
This book discusses the complex ways in which the novel offers a vibrant arena for critically engaging with our contemporary world and scrutinises the genre's political, ethical, and aesthetic value. Far-reaching cultural, political, and technological changes during the past two decades have created new contexts for the novel, which have yet to be accounted for in literary studies. Addressing the need for fresh transdisciplinary approaches that explore these developments, the book focuses on the multifaceted responses of the novel to key global challenges, including migration and cosmopolitanism, posthumanism and ecosickness, human and animal rights, affect and biopolitics, human cognition and anxieties of inattention, and the transculturality of terror. By doing so, it testifies to the ongoing cultural relevance of the genre. Lastly, it examines a range of 21st-century Anglophone novels to encourage new critical discourses in literary studies.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

The Oxford History of the Novel in English PDF Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192659073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 705

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Book Description
The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a twelve-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction, written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, and tendencies. This book offers an account of US fiction during a period demarcated by two traumatic moments: the eve of the entry of the United States into the Second World War and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The aftermath of the Second World War was arguably the high point of US nationalism, but in the years that followed, US writers would increasingly explore the possibility that US democracy was a failure, both at home and abroad. For so many of the writers whose work this volume explores, the idea of "nation" became suspect as did the idea of "national literature" as the foundation for US writing. Looking at post-1940s writing, the literary historian might well chart a movement within literary cultures away from nationalism and toward what we would call "cosmopolitanism," a perspective that fosters conversations between the occupants of different cultural spaces and that regards difference as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved. During this period, the novel has had significant competition for the US public's attention from other forms of narrative and media: film, television, comic books, videogames, and the internet and the various forms of social media that it spawned. If, however, the novel becomes a "residual" form during this period, it is by no means archaic. The novel has been reinvigorated over the past eighty years by its encounters with both emergent forms (such as film, television, comic books, and digital media) and the emergent voices typically associated with multiculturalism in the United States.

Fictions of Infinity

Fictions of Infinity PDF Author: Martin Riedelsheimer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110712407
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This study traces the connection of infinity and Levinasian ethics in 21st-century fiction. It tackles the paradox of how infinity can be (re-)presented in the finite space between the covers of a book and finds an answer that combines conceptual metaphor theory with concepts from classical narratology and beyond, such as mise en abyme, textual circularity, intertextuality or omniscient narration. It argues that texts with such structures may be conceptualised as infinite via Lakoff and Núñez’s Basic Metaphor of Infinity. The catachrestic transfer of infinity from structure to text means that the texts themselves are understood to be infinite. Taking its cue from the central role of the infinite in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, the function of such ‘fictions of infinity’ turns out to be ethical: infinite textuality disrupts reading patterns and calls into question the reader’s spontaneity to interpret. This hypothesis is put to the test in detailed readings of four 21st-century novels, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and John Banville’s The Infinities. This book thus combines ethical criticism with structural aesthetics to uncover ethical potential in fiction.