| Popis: |
'''Everything now is measured by after": Literary Representation of 9/11 and the Dialectics of Continuity and Discontinuity' This thesis locates an elusive but fundamental dialectic between narrative drives toward 'continuity' and 'discontinuity' in 12 major literary and cinematic representations of 9/11. It interrogates the development of this dialectic, which contains the many opposing narratives that work against each other in response to the attacks: the tension between political discourse and traumatic rupture; the dialectical aspect of trauma itself which is at once a limit experience and something that works in aggregate or in repetition; the tension between public and private consciousness, the inherent opposition in the rhetoric of a 'changed world' and 'epoch', to the historicising narratives of American imperialism or the Cold War nostalgia of the G.W. Bush administration. By engaging with this dialectic, this thesis comes to terms with some of the nuances of narratives that reflect a deeply conflicted, complicated and problematic national and international response, negotiating a broader fault line which mirrors the simultaneous need for memorialisation and self-reflexive insight. This framework allows illuminating connections to be made within a contested, emerging canon of narrative representation of 9/11 and facilitates a wider understanding of the relationships between trends and tropes in this corpus; the experimental aesthetics of early texts, the trend of domestic realism, the cautious, 'seismographic' narratives and the more explicit 'first world' national allegories. What, it will ask, do these texts suggest about the lasting impact of 9/11? Ultimately, this thesis charts and explores the cautious movement toward points of reconciliation in these polarised narrative trajectories, whilst demonstrating that these texts accrue their fullest meaning and are most instructive and illuminating as read within this framework. |
