Download or read book 9 11 Fiction Empathy and Otherness written by Tim Gauthier and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness analyzes recent works of fiction whose principal subject is the attacks of September 11, 2001. The readings of the novels question and assess the validity and potential effectiveness of both the subsequent calls for a cosmopolitan outlook and the related, but no less significant, emphasis placed on empathy, and exhibited in such recent studies as Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization, Karsten Stueber's Rediscovering Empathy, and Julinna Oxley's The Moral Dimensions of Empathy. As such, this study examines the extent to which "us" and "them" narratives proliferated after 9/11, and the degree to which calls for greater empathy and a renewed emphasis on cosmopolitan values served to counterbalance an apparent movement towards increased polarization, encapsulated in the oft-mentioned "clash of civilizations." A principal objective of the book is thus to examine the ethical and political implications revealed in the exercising or withholding of empathy. For though empathy, in and of itself, may not be sufficient, it is nevertheless a vital component in the generation of actions one might identify as cosmopolitan. In other words, this book examines the responses to 9/11 (in both Western and non-Western novels) in order to uncover what their dramatic renderings might tell us about the possibility of a truly globalized community. The attainability of any cosmopolitan engagement is contingent upon our abilities to understand the other, knowing always that otherness eludes our grasp, and the best we can do is imagine some version of it. It is primarily in this capacity that the novel has a role to play. Whether it is the challenge of connecting with the survivors of trauma and the inhabitants of a traumatized city, or with a hyperpower that has experienced its own vulnerability for the first time, or even with the terrorist who seeks to commit violent acts, these novels afford us the means of examining the complex dynamics involved in any exhibition of fellow-feeling for the other, and the ever-present potential failure of that engagement.

Download or read book British and American Representations of 9 11 written by Oana-Celia Gheorghiu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that twenty-first-century neorealist fiction is inspired by political and journalistic discourses and, along with them, constitutes one of the many representations of the attacks on September 11 and their outcomes. Adopting a neorealist stance, this book is placed at the intersection of realism and fiction, with often reference to what is perceived as objective writing (media and political texts), not at all so divorced from the practice of literary writings on the event that shook the world on September 11, 2001.

Download or read book Radical Planes 9 11 and Patterns of Continuity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-09-07 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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?

Download or read book Post 9 11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction written by Pei-chen Liao and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-19 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers’ reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans’ stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that the novels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present.

Download or read book The Oxford History of the Novel in English written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-04 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Violence Elsewhere 2 written by Dr Clare Bielby and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-11-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines ideas of violence in German culture after 9/11 through the lens of "violence elsewhere" - exploring works and discourses about violence in distant locations or times. Following the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, in postwar Germany thinking or speaking about that extreme violence seemed distinctively difficult - even perhaps, at times, impossible. Yet we can learn about understandings of violence in this period in novel ways by exploring images and constructions in German culture of faraway violence, as shown in the recent volume Violence Elsewhere 1: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany, 1945-2001. As of September 11, 2001, violence came to appear transnationally, spectacularly mobile in new ways. Consequently, Violence Elsewhere 2 explores ideas about "violence elsewhere" in German-language culture since 2001. Here, "elsewhere" can mean not only distant places; it may also be violence perceived as foreign, or in the past. Simultaneously, this work suggests that the idea of 9/11 as a watershed in thinking about violence is more complex than meets the eye. Here, nine essays consider classic literary forms like poetry and prose fiction, from the short story to the intergenerational German family novel to Black feminist speculative fiction. Contributors examine, too, philosophy, performance and multimedia art, political and other forms of public discourse, and film. Topics include, amongst others, the "war on terror," slow environmental violence, the Armenian genocide, portrayals of refugees and migrants, legacies of colonial violence, space travel, and the persistent resonance of the German past. Contributors: Sofía Forchieri, Susanne C. Knittel, Marie Kolkenbrock, Priscilla Layne, Joanne Leal, Francesca Lewis, Frauke Matthes, Lizzie Stewart, Nicola Thomas, and Kathrin Wunderlich. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Download or read book The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse Literature and Film written by Michael Frank and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-06-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The City Since 9 11 written by Keith Wilhite and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charting the intersection of aesthetic representation and the material conditions of urban space, The City Since 9/11 posits that the contemporary metropolis provides a significant context for reassessing theoretical concerns related to narrative, identity, home, and personal precarity. In the years since the September 11 attacks, writers and filmmakers have explored urban spaces as contested sites—shaped by the prevailing discourses of neoliberalism, homeland security, and the war on terror, but also haunted by an absence in the landscape that registers loss and prefigures future menace. In works of literature, film, and television, the city emerges as a paradoxical space of permanence and vulnerability and a convergence point for anxieties about globalization, structural inequality, and apocalyptic violence. Building on previous scholarship addressing trauma and the spectacle of terror, the contributors also draw upon works of philosophy, urban studies, and postmodern geography to theorize how literary and visual representations expose the persistent conflicts that arise as cities rebuild in the shadow of past ruins. Their essays advance new lines of argument that clarify art’s role in contemporary debates about spatial practices, gentrification, cosmopolitanism, memory and history, nostalgia, the uncanny and the abject, postmodern virtuality, the politics of realism, and the economic and social life of cities. The book offers fresh readings of familiar post-9/11 novels, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, but it also considers works by Teju Cole, Joseph O’Neill, Silver Krieger, Colum McCann, Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon, Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, William Gibson, Amitav Ghosh, and Katherine Boo. In addition, The City Since 9/11 includes essays on the films Children of Men, Hugo, and the adaptation of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, chapters on the television series The Bridge, The Killing, and The Wire, and an analysis of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence and the 9/11 Memorial.

Download or read book Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 written by James Acheson and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on the novels published since 2000 by twenty major British novelistsThe Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 is divided into five parts, with the first part examining the work of four particularly well-known and highly regarded twenty-first century writers: Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith. It is with reference to each of these novelists in turn that the terms arealist, apostmodernist, ahistorical and apostcolonialist fiction are introduced, while in the remaining four parts, other novelists are discussed and the meaning of the terms amplified. From the start it is emphasised that these terms and others often mean different things to different novelists, and that the complexity of their novels often obliges us to discuss their work with reference to more than one of the terms.Also discusses the works of: Maggie OFarrell, Sarah Hall, A.L. Kennedy, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson, Salman Rushdie, Adam Foulds, Sarah Waters, James Robertson, Mohsin Hamid, Andrea Levy, and Aminatta Forna.

Download or read book US Narratives of Nuclear Terrorism Since 9 11 written by David Seed and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-06 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the US fiction and related films which makes a series of interventions in the cultural debate over the threat of nuclear terrorism. It traces the beginnings of this anxiety from the 1970s, which increased during the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The traumatic events of 9/11 became a major reference point for this fiction, which expressed the fear that of a second and worse 9/11. The study examines narratives of conspiracies which are detected and forestalled, and of others which lead to the worst of all outcomes – nuclear detonations, sometimes delivered by suitcase nukes. In some of these narratives the very fate of the nation hangs in the balance in the face of nuclear apocalypse. The discussion considers cases of attacks by electromagnetic pulse (EMP), cyberterrorism and even bioterrorism. Some of the authors examined are present or former politicians, members of the CIA, and former president, Bill Clinton.

Download or read book September 11 2001 as a Cultural Trauma written by Christine Muller and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the September 11, 2001 attacks as a case study of cultural trauma, as well as how the use of widely-distributed, easily-accessible forms of popular culture can similarly focalize evaluation of other moments of acute and profoundly troubling historical change. The attacks confounded the traditionally dominant narrative of the American Dream, which has persistently and pervasively featured optimism and belief in a just world that affirms and rewards self-determination. This shattering of a worldview fundamental to mainstream experience and cultural understanding in the United States has manifested as a cultural trauma throughout popular culture in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Popular press oral histories, literary fiction, television, and film are among the multiple, ubiquitous sites evidencing preoccupations with existential crisis, vulnerability, and moral ambivalence, with fate, no-win scenarios, and anti-heroes now pervading commonly-told and readily-accessible stories. Christine Muller examines how popular culture affords sites for culturally-traumatic events to manifest and how readers, viewers, and other audiences negotiate their fallout.

Download or read book Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis written by Anna Veprinska and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the representation of empathy in contemporary poetry after crisis, specifically poetry after the Holocaust, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. The text argues that, recognizing both the possibilities and dangers of empathy, the poems under consideration variously invite and refuse empathy, thus displaying what Anna Veprinska terms empathetic dissonance. Veprinska proposes that empathetic dissonance reflects the texts’ struggle with the question of the value and possibility of empathy in the face of the crises to which these texts respond. Examining poems from Charlotte Delbo, Dionne Brand, Niyi Osundare, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Fitterman, Wisława Szymborska, Cynthia Hogue, Claudia Rankine, Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Lucille Clifton, and Katie Ford, among others, Veprinska considers empathetic dissonance through language, witnessing, and theology. Merging comparative close readings with interdisciplinary theory from philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, history and literary theory, and trauma studies, this book juxtaposes a genocide, a terrorist act, and a natural disaster amplified by racial politics and human disregard in order to consider what happens to empathy in poetry after events at the limits of empathy.

Download or read book The quiet contemporary American novel written by Rachel Sykes and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the concept of ‘quiet’ – an aesthetic of narrative driven by reflective principles – and argues for the term’s application to the study of contemporary American fiction. In doing so, it makes two critical interventions. Firstly, it maps the neglected history of quiet fictions, arguing that from Hester Prynne to Clarissa Dalloway, from Bartleby to William Stoner, the Western tradition is filled with quiet characters. Secondly, it asks what it means for a novel to be quiet and how we might read for quiet in an American literary tradition that critics so often describe as noisy. Examining recent works by Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, among others, the book argues that quiet can be a multi-faceted state of existence, one that is communicative and expressive in as many ways as noise but filled with potential for radical discourse by its marginalisation as a mode of expression.

Download or read book Home Fronts written by Janina Wierzoch and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have had an impact on the UK rivalled only by Brexit and the global financial crisis. For people at home, the wars were ever-present in the media yet remained distant and difficult to apprehend. Janina Wierzoch offers an analytical survey of British contemporary war narratives in novels, drama, film, and television that seek to make sense of the experience. The study shows how the narratives, instead of reflecting on the UK`s role as invader, portray war as invading the British home. Home loses its post-Cold War sense of »permanent peace« and is recast as a home/front where war once again becomes part of what it means to be »us«.

Download or read book Narratives of the War on Terror written by Michael C. Frank and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature written by María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the multifarious representational strategies used by contemporary writers to textualise memory and its friction areas through literary practices. By focusing on contemporary narratives in English from 1990 to the present, the essays in the collection delve into both the treatment of memory in literature and the view of literature as a medium of memory, paying special attention to major controversies attending the representation and (re)construction of individual, cultural and collective memories in the literary narratives published during the last few decades. By analysing texts written by authors of such diverse origins as Great Britain, South-Korea, the USA, Cuba, Australia, India, as well as Native-American Indian and African-American writers, the contributors to the collection analyse a good range of memory frictions —in connection with melancholic mourning, immigration, diaspora, genocide, perpetrator guilt, dialogic witnessing, memorialisation practices, inherited traumatic memories, sexual abuse, prostitution, etc.— through the recourse to various disciplines —such as psychoanalysis, ethics, (bio)politics, space theories, postcolonial studies, narratology, gender studies—, resulting in a book that is expected to make a ground-breaking contribution to a field whose possibilities have yet to be fully explored.

Download or read book Islamophobia and the Novel written by Peter Morey and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era of rampant Islamophobia, what do literary representations of Muslims and anti-Muslim bigotry tell us about changing concepts of cultural difference? In Islamophobia and the Novel, Peter Morey analyzes how recent works of fiction have framed and responded to the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice, showing how their portrayals of Muslims both reflect and refute the ideological preoccupations of media and politicians in the post-9/11 West. Islamophobia and the Novel discusses novels embodying a range of positions—from the avowedly secular to the religious, and from texts that appear to underwrite Western assumptions of cultural superiority to those that recognize and critique neoimperial impulses. Morey offers nuanced readings of works by John Updike, Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, John le Carré, Khaled Hosseini, Azar Nafisi, and other writers, emphasizing the demands of the literary marketplace for representations of Muslims. He explores how depictions of Muslim experience have challenged liberal assumptions regarding the novel’s potential for empathy and its ability to encompass a variety of voices. Morey argues for a greater degree of critical self-consciousness in our understanding of writing by and about Muslims, in contrast to both exclusionary nationalism and the fetishization of difference. Contemporary literature’s capacity to unveil the conflicted nature of anti-Muslim bigotry expands our range of resources to combat Islamophobia. This, in turn, might contribute to Islamophobia’s eventual dismantling.