Full 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.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Narrative Innovation in 9/11 Fiction
Chapter 1: Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World
Chapter 2: Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Chapter 3: Jess Walter's The Zero
Chapter 4: Don DeLillo's Falling Man
Chapter 5: Ian McEwan's Saturday
Bibliography
Index
