|
" Writing the 9/11 decade "
Lee-Potter, Charlie
| Document Type
|
:
|
Latin Dissertation
|
| Record Number
|
:
|
1099974
|
| Doc. No
|
:
|
TLets590816
|
| Main Entry
|
:
|
Lee-Potter, Charlie
|
| Title & Author
|
:
|
Writing the 9/11 decade\ Lee-Potter, Charlie
|
| College
|
:
|
University of London
|
| Date
|
:
|
2013
|
| student score
|
:
|
2013
|
| Degree
|
:
|
Ph.D.
|
| Abstract
|
:
|
Novelists have struggled to find forms of expression that would allow them toregister the post-9/11 landscape. This thesis examines their tentative andsometimes faltering attempts to establish a critical distance from and create aconvincing narrative and metaphorical lexicon for the historical, political andpsychological realities of the terrorist attacks. I suggest that they have, at times,been distracted by the populist rhetoric of journalistic expression, by a retreat toAmerican exceptional ism and by the demand for an immediate response.The Bush administration's statement that the state and politicians 'create ourown reality' served to reinforce the difficulties that novelists faced in creatingtheir own. Against the background of public commentary post-9/11 , and thepolitics of the subsequent 'War on Terror', the thesis considers the work ofRichard Ford, Paul Auster, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam, Don DeLillo,Mohsin Hamid and Amy Waldman. USing my own extended interviews withFord, Waldman and Shamsie, the artist Eric Fischl, the journalist Kevin Marsh,and with the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams (who is alsoa 9/11 survivor), I consider the aims and praxis of novelists working wilhin avariety of traditions, from Ford's realism and Auster's metafiction to the postcolonialperspectives of Hamid and Aslam, and, finally, the end-of-decadereflections of Waldman.My conclusion is that novelists are, finally, edging closer to methodologiesadequate to the challenges of the post-9/11 world. Ford's admission that writersdo not 'have an exact human vocabulary for the loss of a city' has given way toa new surety that the narrative and visual arts can define the unimaginable inimportant and expressive ways.
|
| Added Entry
|
:
|
University of London
|
| |