9/11 in European Literature: Negotiating Identities Against the Attacks and What Followed

by Svenja Frank (Editor)

Overview

This volume looks at the representation of 9/11 and the resulting wars in European literature. In the face of inner-European divisions the texts under consideration take the terror attacks as a starting point to negotiate European as well as national identity. While the volume shows that these identity formations are frequently based on the construction of two Others—the US nation and a cultural-ethnic idea of Muslim communities—it also analyses examples which undermine such constructions. This much more self-critical strand in European literature unveils the Eurocentrism of a supposedly general humanistic value system through the use of complex aesthetic strategies. These strategies are in itself characteristic of the European reception as the Anglo-Irish, British, Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Italian, and Polish perspectives collected in this volume perceive of the terror attacks through the lens of continental media and semiotic theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319642086
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	11/29/2017
Edition description:	1st ed. 2017
Pages:	386
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Svenja Frank, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, currently works on the meta-critical novel in contemporary German literature and has previously held teaching positions at the University of Freiburg and at Oxford. Her research interests include narrative and literary theory, intermediality and German-language literature of the 20^th and 21^st century.

Table of Contents

9/11 in European Literature. Negotiating Identities Against the Attacks and What Followed.- 9/11: The Interpretation of Disaster as Disaster of Interpretation – an American Catastrophe Reflected in American and European Discourses.- The Wind of the Hudson: Gerhard Richter’s September (2005) and the European Perception of Catastrophe.- Burning from the inside out’: Let the Great World Spin (2009).- Seeing is Disbelieving: The Contested Visibility of 9/11 in France.- Cultural and Historical Memory in English and German Discursive Responses to 9/11.- The Post-9/11 World in Three Polish Responses: Zagajewski, Skolimowski, Tochman.- The Islamic World as Other in Oriana Fallaci’s ‘Trilogy’.- National Identity and Literary Culture after 9/11:Pro- and Anti-Americanism in Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World(2003) and Thomas Hettche’s Woraus wir gemacht sind (2006).- The Mimicry of Dialogue: Thomas Lehr’s September. Fata Morgana (2010).- Europe and Its Discontents: Intra-European Violence in Dutch Literature after 9/11.- Tourist/Terrorist. Narrating Uncertainty in Early European Literature on Guantánamo.- Appendix.