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.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Ann Keniston, University of Nevada Reno, and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn,
Harvard University
Part One: Experiencing 9/11: Space, Temporality, and the Incommensurable Event
Chapter 1: "’Portraits of Grief’: Telling Details and the Testimony of Trauma," Nancy
K. Miller, Graduate Center, CUNY
Chapter 2: "‘Curtains of Ash’: Poetry, 9/11 and Time," Jeffrey Gray, Seton Hall
University
Chapter 3: "‘Sometimes Things Disappear’: Absence and Mutability in Colson
Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York," Stephanie Li, University of Rochester
Chapter 4: "Finding Time after 9/11: The Frustrated Forms of Spiegelman and
Foer," Mitchum Huehls, UCLA
Chapter 5: "Witnessing 9/11: Art Spiegelman and the Persistence of Trauma," Richard
Glezjer, North Central College
Part Two: 9/11 Politics and the Ideology of Form
Chapter 6: "Still Life: 9/11’s Falling Bodies," Laura Frost, Yale University
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, McDaniel College
Chapter 8: "Portraits 9/11/01: The New York Times and the Pornography of Grief,"
Simon Stow, College of William and Mary, and Ara Osterweil, Muhlenberg
College
Chapter 9: "Graphic Implosion: Politics, Time, and Value in Post-9/11 Comics," Simon
Cooper, Monash University, and Paul Atkinson, Monash University
Chapter 10: "‘Big brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing’: The Virus
of Language and the Politics of Self-Censorship in Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby," Lance Allen Rubin, Arapahoe Community College
Part Three: Aftermath: 9/11 and the Literary Tradition
Chapter 11: "Telling It Like It Isn’t," David Simpson, UC Davis
Chapter 12: "Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private in Post-9/11 Literature,"
Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne
Chapter 13: "Theater after 9/11," Robert Brustein, American Repertory Theater and
Harvard University
Chapter 14: "‘Looking backward in order to look forward’: Truth-Telling in the 9/11
Commission Report," Zachary Weir, Miami University
Chapter 15: "The Plot Against America as 9/11 Prosthesis," Chuck Lewis, Beloit College
Afterword: "Dates and Words"
Robert Pinsky, Boston University
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.
