This volume offers a critical analysis of a segment of American literary production surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. While focusing on the writing of Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, the author locates this work within a larger 9/11 cultural archive. The book proceeds by way of a series of thematic leaps in order to unearth the active entanglement of the event with systems of meaning and power that create the conditions for its emergence and understanding. The main problem of such an approach consists in articulating the three-fold relation at the heart of the archive in which issues of traumatic loss, affect, and politics appear as central: between the historical event, its cultural imprint, and the wider social system. In order to grasp these fundamental relations, the author resorts to a layered interpretive framework and engages a number of theoretical protocols, from psychoanalysis and nationalism studies to philosophy of history, world-system theory, and the heterogeneous critical practices of American Studies. Coming from a non-US Americanist perspective, this contribution to the scholarly production about 9/11 concentrates on trauma as a problem in the conceptualization the event, insists on globalization as its crucial context, and argues for a historical materialist approach to the 9/11 archive.
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Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading the 9/11 Archive
Enduring Event: Telling Stories around September 11
Constant Replay: Community Building at the Site/Sight of Trauma
Common Ground: Melodramas of 9/11
Shock and Own: Mediation and Expropriation In the Shadow of No Towers
Globalizing (the) Nation
The Market Moves Us in Mysterious Ways: Don DeLillo on 9/11
Cosmopolis: A Meditation on Deterritorialization
Killing Politics: The Art of Recovery in Falling Man
Good Mourning, America: Genealogies of Loss in Against the Day
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Sven Cvek teaches American literature and culture at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia. His interests include contemporary US literature and popular culture, visual culture, and problems of globalization.
