Abstract
After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication devised a new classification. The category, September 11 Terrorist Attacks 2001-Fiction, responded to a distinct genre of political novels that include among others: Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006). The American novelists’ call to the phenomenon of, and response to, global jihad finds an echo in Western Europe and even Australia where Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2007), Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (2003), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (2006) explore, in different ways, the sociology of the modern city in an age of terror. What light, if any, does the contemporary novelist shed upon that distinctive, new, urban character: the Jihadi? After more than a decade of intellectual reflection on the events of 9/11, what do these novels tell us, more particularly, about secular, modern liberalism adrift in an interconnected, but by no means integrated, cosmopolitan world confronted with the gnostic certainties of the religiously inspired political actor?
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Notes
Leon Edel, “Introduction,” The Princess Casamassima, The Bodley Head Henry James, 10 vols., 10 (London: The Bodley Head, 1972), p. 5.
Andre Malraux, Man’s Estate (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 4.
Richard Rorty, “Heidgger, Kundera and Dickens,” Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 68.
Richard Rorty, “Introduction,” Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: University Press, 1989), p. xvii.
John Updike, Terrorist (New York: London, 2006), p. 20.
Jay McInerney, The Good Life (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 4.
Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007), p. 34.
Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 55.
See Aristotle, Politics (London: Penguin, 1976)
Michel Houellebecq, Platform (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 163.
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007), pp. 31–32.
Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist (London: Picador, 2006), p. 142.
See Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Batt, Radicalization in the West: The Home Grown Threat (New York: New York City Police Department 2007)
Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), p. 154.
Barry Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1984), p. xii.
Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 1.
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 283.
Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (London: The Bodley Head, 1972), p. 335.
Thus, Nikita Necator, in Under Western Eyes, regards himself a celebrity of the militant revolution and only succumbs to petit bourgeois emotions when Razumov, the unknown, putative assassin of a Czarist minister, outdoes his feats of violence. On meeting Razumov, Necator performs “his horrible squeaky burlesque of professional jealousy exasperated like a fashionable tenor by the attention attracted to the performance of an obscure amateur.” Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p. 198.
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© 2014 David Martin Jones and M. L. R. Smith
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Jones, D.M., Smith, M.L.R. (2014). Political Fiction and Jihad: The Novel Response to 9/11. In: Sacred Violence. Rethinking Political Violence series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137328069_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137328069_8
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