Falling Man and the Aesthetics of Terrorism
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Chiara Battisti
Chiara Battisti is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona- Italy. Her research interests include literature and the visual arts (with a particular focus on literature and cinema), literature and science, law, literature and culture, gender studies, disability studies, fashion studies, and food studies Chiara Battisti is a member of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) and of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura).
Abstract
This paper analyses Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man as an influential example of post-9/11 literature. This novel, in describing the shattering impact of the destruction of the symbolic reference points that determine our experience of reality, has undoubtedly contributed to defining a “before and after 9/11” cultural scenario, where the new era is abruptly marked by the presence of new meanings, new attitudes, new spaces and new categories. This complex reframing of reality has engendered a new approach to the role of art, and especially of literature, in the Western world. This paper demonstrates that Falling Man can be read a site of political (re)configuration, in which the return to the link between the creative process and the issue of terrorism – a theme that runs through much of DeLillo’s writing – leads to a move beyond established categories and concepts. Such a move responds to a public need for a reconceptualisation of paradigms of terror/horror. I argue that the novel’s narrativisation of terrorism has introduced important suggestions into the contemporary cultural panorama, which now allow us to identify both a new form of terrorism that is closely connected with the emergent metamodern sensibility, and new aesth-ethical concepts that are better suited to describing contemporary violence.
About the author
Chiara Battisti is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona- Italy. Her research interests include literature and the visual arts (with a particular focus on literature and cinema), literature and science, law, literature and culture, gender studies, disability studies, fashion studies, and food studies Chiara Battisti is a member of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) and of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura).
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Foreword: Law and Art in the Aftermath
- The Right(s) to Remain: Art, Asylum and Political Representation in Australia
- Dis-Affective Justice in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006)
- Contemporary Art in the Aftermath of Legal Positivism: The ‘Other’ Contract Art as Material Jurisprudence
- ‘NO GO’: Artists, Trespass and the Aftermath of Occupation
- Research
- Dystopian Images of Law and Visual Performances of Identity in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games
- Books, Broadcasters and the BBC: The Conversations Among British Modern Literature, Media and the Law
- Falling Man and the Aesthetics of Terrorism
- Book Reviews
- Shulamit Almog: The Origins of Law in Homer
- Kieran Tranter: Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Foreword: Law and Art in the Aftermath
- The Right(s) to Remain: Art, Asylum and Political Representation in Australia
- Dis-Affective Justice in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006)
- Contemporary Art in the Aftermath of Legal Positivism: The ‘Other’ Contract Art as Material Jurisprudence
- ‘NO GO’: Artists, Trespass and the Aftermath of Occupation
- Research
- Dystopian Images of Law and Visual Performances of Identity in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games
- Books, Broadcasters and the BBC: The Conversations Among British Modern Literature, Media and the Law
- Falling Man and the Aesthetics of Terrorism
- Book Reviews
- Shulamit Almog: The Origins of Law in Homer
- Kieran Tranter: Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology
