9/11 in European Literature

Negotiating Identities Against the Attacks and What Followed

Svenja Frank

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319642086
• eBook ISBN: 9783319642093
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume looks at the representation of 9/11 and the resulting wars in European literature. In the face of inner-European divisions the textsunder 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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• About the Editor
• List of Figures
• Introduction: 911 in European Literature
• Part I September 11 Seen Through European Media and Semiotic Theory
• 911: 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)
• Part II Literary Translations of September 11 into Europe’s National Contexts
• Seeing Is Disbelieving: The Contested Visibility of 911 in France
• Cultural and Historical Memory in English and German Discursive Responses to 911
• The Post-911 World in Three Polish Responses: Zagajewski, Skolimowski, Tochman
• The Islamic World as Other in Oriana Fallaci’s “Trilogy”
• Part III Negotiating European Identity After September 11 Through the Double Other of the US and Islam
• National Identity and Literary Culture After 911: 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 911
• TouristTerrorist: Narrating Uncertainty in Early European Literature on Guantánamo
• Appendix: Extract from Giovanna Capucci’s Twin Towers: poesie, with translations by Gillian Ania
• References
• Index