When everything is about 9/11 : on reading contemporary fiction through 9/11 and the boundaries of the 9/11 novel

Sini Eikonsalo

doi:10.5817/BSE2024-1-8

When everything is about 9/11 : on reading contemporary fiction through 9/11 and the boundaries of the 9/11 novel

Vol.50,No.1(2024)

Sini Eikonsalo

https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2024-1-8

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/digilib.81079

PDF

Abstract

This article examines the boundaries of the term 9/11 novel by exploring what we truly mean when we say a novel is about 9/11 and what are the issues in reading general twenty-first-century literature through 9/11. By taking a thorough look at 9/11 literary scholarship, I argue that the issue of defining the 9/11 novel has been largely overlooked; consequently, the label 9/11 has often been stamped too easily on twenty-first-century fiction. In the aim to establish the boundaries of 9/11 fiction, I compare the thematic, temporal, and spatial features of some of the most iconic 9/11 novels to two works which have been commonly read as 9/11 novels even though they do not explicitly discuss the attacks, Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. By building on this discussion, I offer a concise definition of what a 9/11 novel is and where 9/11 ends.

Keywords:
9/11 novel; contemporary fiction; Cormac McCarthy's The Road; Philip Roth's The Plot Against America; genre; subgenre

Pages:
137–153

References

Adams, Tim (2009) Cormac McCarthy: America's great poetic visionary. The Guardian 20 Dec. 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2009/dec/20/observer-profile-cormac-mccarthy Accessed on 9 July 2024.

Banita, Georgiana (2012) Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Irom, Bimbisar (2012) Alterities in a time of terror: notes on the subgenre of the American 9/11 novel. Contemporary Literature 53 (3), 517–547.

Beigbeder, Frédéric (2005) Windows on the World. 2004. London, Harper Perennial.

Brearey, Oliver James. (2012) The technological paradox in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The Explicator 70 (4), 335–338.

Cooper, Lydia R. (2011) Cormac McCarthy's The Road as apocalyptic grail narrative. Studies in the Novel 43 (2), 218–236.

Cvek, Sven (2011) Towering Figures: Reading the 9/11 Archive. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

DeLillo, Don (2008) Falling Man. 2007. New York, Scribner.

Däwes, Birgit. (2011) Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel. Heidelberg, Universitatsverlag Winter.

Foer, Jonathan Safran (2018) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. 2005. London: Penguin Books.

Frow, John (2015) Genre. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge-Taylor & Francis.

Gray, Richard (2011) After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hamid, Mohsin (2018) The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 2007. London, Penguin Books.

Holloway, David (2008) 9/11 and the War on Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

Johns-Putra, Adeline (2016) 'My job is to take care of you': climate change, humanity, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Modern Fiction Studies 62 (3), 519–540.

Kalfus, Ken (2006§) A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. London, Simon & Schuster.

Keeble, Arin (2014) The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity. Jefferson: McFarland.

Keniston, Ann, and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (2008) Introduction: representing 9/11: literature and resistance. In: Keniston, Ann and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (eds.) Literature after 9/11. New York: Routledge-Taylor & Francis, 1–15.

Kohari, Alizeh (2011) Is there a novel that defines the 9/11 decade? BBC News 28 Aug. 2011. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-14682741 Accessed on 9 July 2024.

Lewis, Charles (2008) Real planes and imaginary towers: Philip Roth's The Plot Against America as 9/11 prosthetic screen. In: Keniston, Ann and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (eds.) Literature after 9/11. New York: Routledge-Taylor & Francis, 246–260.

McCarthy, Cormac (2009) The Road. 2006. London: Picador.

McInerney, Jay (2006) The Good Life. New York: Vintage Contemporaries.

Melnick, Jeffrey (2009) 9/11 Culture: America under Construction. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Mishra, Pankaj (2007) The End of Innocence. The Guardian 19 May 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/may/19/fiction.martinamis Accessed on 9 July 2024.

Petrovic, Paul (2015) Introduction: emergent trends in post-9/11 literature and criticism. In: Petrovic, Paul (ed.) Representing 9/11: Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and Television. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, ix–xvii.

Pöhlmann, Sascha (2010) Collapsing identities: the representation and imagination of the terrorist in Falling Man. In: Schneck, Peter and Philipp Schweighauser (eds.) Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. New York: Continuum, 51–64.

Randall, Martin (2011) 9/11 and the Literature of Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

Roth, Philip (2004) The Plot Against America. London: Jonathan Cape.

Roth, Philip (2004) The story behind 'The Plot Against America'. The New York Times 19 Sept. 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/books/review/the-story-behind-the-plot-against-america.html Accessed on 7 July 2023.

Shostak, Debra (2016) Prosthetic fictions: reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close through Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. In: Morley, Catherine (ed.) 9/11: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 21–40.

Sykes, Rachel (2014) A failure of imagination? Problems in 'post-9/11' fiction. In: Fanuzzi, Rober and Michael Wolfe (eds) Recovering 9/11 in New York. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 248–262.

Updike, John (2007) Terrorist. 2006. London: Penguin Books.

Versluys, Kristiaan (2009) Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP.

Walter, Jess (2006) The Zero. New York, Regan.

Ward, Maggie (2018) Predicting Trump and Presenting Canada in Philip Roth's The Plot against America. Canadian Review of American Studies 48 (1), 17–37.

Worthington, Marjorie (2011) The fleeting '9/11 effect' in The Good Life and Lunar Park. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 44 (2), 111–125.

Metrics