
Literature after 9/11
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Book Description
Drawing on trauma theory, genre theory, political theory, and theories of postmodernity, space, and temporality, Literature After 9/11 suggests ways that these often distinct discourses can be recombined and set into dialogue with one another as it explores 9/11’s effects on literature and literature’s attempts to convey 9/11.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Representing 9/11: Literature and Resistance," Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn
Part One: Experiencing 9/11: Time, Trauma, and the Incommensurable Event
Chapter 1: "Portraits of Grief: Telling Details and the New Genres of Testimony," Nancy K. Miller
Chapter 2: "Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11’s Timely Traumas," Mitchum Huehls
Chapter 3: "Graphic Implosion: Politics, Time, and Value in Post-9/11 Comics," Simon Cooper and Paul Atkinson
Chapter 4: "‘Sometimes Things Disappear’: Absence and Mutability in Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York," Stephanie Li
Chapter 5: "Witnessing 9/11: Art Spiegelman and the Persistence of Trauma," Richard Glejzer
Part Two: 9/11 Politics and Representation
Chapter 6: "Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private in Post-9/11 Literature," Michael Rothberg
Chapter 7: "‘We’re not a friggin’ girl band’: September 11, Masculinity, and the British-American Relationship in David Hare’s Stuff Happens and Ian McEwan’s Saturday," Rebecca Carpenter
Chapter 8: "‘We’re the culture that cried wolf’: Discourse and Terrorism in Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby," Lance Allen Rubin
Chapter 9: "Still Life: 9/11’s Falling Bodies," Laura Frost
Part Three: 9/11 and the Literary Tradition
Chapter 10: "Telling It Like It Isn’t," David Simpson
Chapter 11: "Portraits 9/11/01: The New York Times and the Pornography of Grief," Simon Stow
Chapter 12: "Theater after 9/11," Robert Brustein
Chapter 13: "Real Planes and Imaginary Towers: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America as 9/11 Prosthetic Screen," Charles Lewis
Chapter 14: "Precocious Testimony: Poetry and the Uncommemorable," Jeffrey Gray
Afterword: "Imagination and Monstrosity," Robert Pinsky
Contributors
Index
Editor(s)
Biography
Ann Keniston is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada-Reno, and is the author of Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry (Routledge 2006), and a poetry collection, The Caution of Human Gestures (David Robert, 2005).
Jeanne Follansbee Quinn is director of studies for the Program in History and Literature at Harvard University and has published essays on James Agee and Walker Evans, Richard Wright and American pragmatism. She is completing a book on anti-fascist aesthetics in the United States during the 1930s, Democratic Aesthetics: Popular Front Anti-Fascism.