Abstract
The conclusions to this book converge at realisation that the literary writings on 9/11 rewrite and renegotiate the past, reconfigure mentalities and bring identity mechanisms, power structures, discursive practices and the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ to the fore. They make up a literary subgenre—9/11 fiction—anchored for the most part in neorealism. With its politicised, thought-provoking realism, its interplay of reality and fiction, its descriptions of a warlike atmosphere of terror and its departures from what is, in a desperate plunge into what should have been, 9/11 fiction is one of the hallmarks of contemporary literature worthy of a readership increasingly interested in keeping up with the ways of the world. After all, not many events in world history have ‘a literature of their own’.
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Notes
- 1.
Martin Amis’s The Last Days of Muhammad Atta has been disregarded in this respect.
- 2.
The author does not even accept being considered British but English: ‘I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I’m an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.’ Ian McEwan in Carrell, August 2012.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1989. The Rustle of Language. Trans. R. Howard. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Carrell, Severin. 2012. ‘I Am an English Writer, Not a British One, Ian McEwan Tells Alex Salmond’. The Guardian, August 22. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/22/ian-mcewan-not-a-british-writer. Accessed 11 Mar 2016.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge.
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Gheorghiu, OC. (2018). Afterthoughts. In: British and American Representations of 9/11. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75250-1_6
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