Volume 58, Issue 1

This essay is based on the premise that the discourse on literature and 9/11 is mostly a discourse on fiction and 9/11. The debate on 9/11 as the end of postmodernism, relativism, or irony centers mainly around novels, and critical responses to these texts often address what they perceive as problems of representation, narrative, and character. Yet this critical framework unduly limits the debate on literature and 9/11 since it offers only a narrow view of what literary texts can or should do. To counter this limitation, this analysis considers texts that are not bound to such expectations of representation. Since poetry as a form of expression and imagination operates according to a different set of conventions than fiction, and especially since it is liberated from narrative constraints, it can offer very different approaches to 9/11 than fiction. In doing so, it raises questions about how it relates the word to the world. Is poetry either the manipulation of signifiers or the imitation of reality? Will we have to choose between seeing poetry either as an abstract language game or as representational fiction that looks like poetry? This essay discusses a selection of poetic and theoretical responses with regard to issues such as the relation of formal or linguistic experiment and political statement, the imagination of terrorism and war in the context of (literary) history, and the negotiation between representation and imagination in general

The musical response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on American targets ran the gamut from fear to violent revenge. As this essay argues, in one way or another, most of the post-9/11 songs also engaged in acts of mourning - for lives lost or previously held notions of invulnerability. Using Judith Butler’s work on the precariousness of human life and the vulnerability of human existence, this paper sets out to analyze who and what is mourned in these songs, and to gauge the limits that were set for acceptable mourning. Drawing on a Levinasian framework of ethical responsibility, the essay argues that our susceptibility to being violated from without serves as the basis for human sociality. Restricting the range of those whose deaths can be mourned, several of the songs under discussion fail to embrace a Levinasian responsibility for the other. Others open the arms of humanity more widely, limiting their dirges not to particular groups but engage in what can rightfully be called ‘mourning humanity’

If images of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the subsequent engulfment of lower Manhattan in soot and debris have come to signify 9/11 in the popular imaginary, so, too, have they become a trope in many 9/11 novels. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) employ this trope by positioning their protagonists, mostly in crucial moments in their character developments, within eyeshot of the World Trade Center. While the character developments take on different directions from there, the individual descriptions of the attacks on the Twin Towers all offer similar impressions; so similar in fact, that readers might feel that they are now reading, in a fictional context, the very images that they themselves witnessed, either in person or mediated through global media. Such passages invite the reader to remember, rather than to imagine, the extent to which the collapse of the Twin Towers signifies the deep rupture in the social grain of American culture that 9/11 has come to constitute. Employing different modes of visualization, Messud’s, McInerney’s, and DeLillo’s novels exemplify to which degree descriptive passages can mediate simultaneity, metaphoricity, and performance, respectively. These visual turns add a new perspective to discussions about the fictional mediation of 9/11 in contemporary literature

This article analyzes the representation of ethics in Pat Barker’s novel Double Vision (2003), exploring the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the communities and individuals aggregated in the novel. In particular, it examines the ways in which an internationalization of empathy (shored up by media representation of global war, especially through the journalism of attachment) dovetails with the failure of the individual to internalize sympathy in its emotional underpinnings. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, which Barker places in the broader historical and geographical context of war atrocities and crimes, thus mark the point where the internationalization of empathy precipitates its domestic failure. By applying to the novel the critical apparatus on the cataleptic condition as proposed by ethicist Martha Nussbaum, this essay reveals the personal risks and benefits associated with the rotation of representational ethics around an international axis