Terror in Global Narrative

Transcription

1 Terror in Global Narrative

2 George Fragopoulos Liliana M. Naydan Editors Terror in Global Narrative Representations of 9/11 in the Age of Late-Late Capitalism

3 Editors George Fragopoulos Queensborough Community College CUNY, Bayside, New York, USA Liliana M. Naydan Penn State Abington Abington, Pennsylvania, USA ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Control Number: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: Visual&Written SL / Alamy Stock Photo Cover design by Jenny Vong Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

4 Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the support of our many mentors, friends, and family. George Fragopoulos would like to thank his parents, Peter and Cathy Fragopoulos, and his partner, Meghan C. Fox, for all their support and encouragement. George would also like to thank his supportive colleagues and friends at Queensborough Community College, CUNY. Much of his work on this project was kindly supported by CUNY in the form of grants and course releases, and for that he is grateful. Liliana M. Naydan would like to thank her parents, Michael and Roxanne Naydan, her husband, Jim McAsey, and the faculty members and administrators at Penn State Abington who supported her as she worked on this collection, most notably Roy Robson and Norah Schultz. Both George and Liliana would also like to thank each of the contributors to this collection. Via their contributions, these contributors pushed on the bounds of what counts as the literature, art, and scholarship of 9/11 and they made this edited collection a pleasure to produce. Last but not least, the editors would like to thank everyone at Palgrave for their support and for helping to see this book into print. Permissions Grateful acknowledgment to Groundswell Production to reproduce images from Tom McCarthy s The Visitor (2007). Excerpts from Miranda Beeson s Flight, and Vicki Hudspith s Nodding Cranes are from Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians, Melville House, v

5 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grateful acknowledgment to Hatchette Book Group and the Waxman Leavell Literary Agency to reproduce selections from Guantánamo Diary (2015). Claudia Rankine, excerpts from Don t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Copyright 2004 by Claudia Rankine. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Banksy Tribeca Twin Towers photo reprinted gratefully with the permission of LAN/Corbis.

6 Contents 1 Introduction: Like an Artwork in Its Own Right : Artistic Representations of 9/11 in a Late-Late Capitalist Age of Terror 1 Liliana M. Naydan and George Fragopoulos Part I Textual Representations of 9/ The Enemy Within: Max Brooks s World War Z and the Terror of Living Death 19 Scott Ortolano 3 Indecorous Responses to 9/11 in Mohsin Hamid s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Ken Kalfus s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, and Jess Walter s The Zero 37 Liliana M. Naydan 4 Redacted Tears, Aesthetics of Alterity: Mohamedou Ould Slahi s Guantánamo Diary 55 Erin Trapp vii

7 viii CONTENTS 5 A Bird in the Hand: Aesthetics and Capital in the Anthology Poetry After 9/11 77 Scott Cleary Part II Toward an Imaging of 9/ Narrative Wreckage: Terror, Illness, and Healing in the Post-9/11 Poethics of Claudia Rankine 95 Mark A. Tabone 7 On Claiming Responsibility: Banksy s Art as Counter-Narrative to the Bureaucratization of the Imagination 119 George Fragopoulos 8 The Return of Myth: Icons, Mythology, and the Universal Narrative of 9/ Ruth Knepel 9 Gerhard Richter s September and the Politics of Ambivalence 157 Mafalda Dâmaso Part III Movie Representations, Tele-Visions, and a Web of 9/ We Now Interrupt this Program: Pre-Empting the Apocalypse in ABC s Miracles 175 Jason Ramírez 11 Music Videos and Locker Room Humor: Rescue Me Reckons with Post-9/11 Hero Worship 191 Shelley Manis

8 CONTENTS ix 12 Post-9/11 New York on Screen: Mourning, Surveillance, and the Arab Other in Tom McCarthy s The Visitor 209 Elizabeth Toohey 13 Little Shop of : Intersections of the 9/11 Memorial Museum Gift Shop, Capitalism, and Journalism 231 Alison Novak Index 253

9 List of Contributors Scott Cleary is an Associate Professor of English at Iona College and director of its Institute for Thomas Paine Studies. He has published articles on Christopher Smart, Alexander Pope, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and eighteenth-century English Catholicism. His interest in 9/11 and poetry grew out of the experiences he had as an eyewitness to the events of that September day. Mafalda Dâmaso is a PhD candidate and Assistant Lecturer in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Following her academic background in sociology, philosophy, and politics, her work focuses on the intersection between visual cultures, contemporary art, and political theory. While Dâmaso s doctoral research discusses the modes of presentation of the United Nations, she is also interested in contemporary art practices that engage with international relations and war. Research interests include: visual cultures, contemporary art, image studies, theories of mediation, contemporary art theory, political theory, epistemology. George Fragopoulos is Assistant Professor of English at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York. His scholarly work has appeared in the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, the Journal of Modern Literature (JML), MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association. He has chapters in the edited collections Reading Duncan Reading and Manolis Anagnostakis: Poetry and Politics, Silence and Agency in Post-War Greece. He is currently working on two projects: a selected letters of the modernist xi

10 xii List of Contributors author Laura (Riding) Jackson and a critical study on art and aesthetic theory in the twentieth-century, tentatively titled The Aesthetics of Silence. Ruth Knepel worked in advertising and event management for five years. She then studied German and English Linguistics and Literary Studies and also covered Economics at Technische Universität of Darmstadt and Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. Currently, she is teaching English Literature as a research fellow at Goethe University of Frankfurt and works on her PhD thesis on iconic concepts and mythological narrative in post-9/11 novels and TV series. Her main research interests are iconology, visuality in literature, and Gothic literature. Further, she works as a freelancer in public relations and performs as a singer of a Heavy Metal Band. Shelley Manis received her PhD in Theatre History & Criticism/ Performance as a Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include dramaturgy, intersections between post- 9/11 rhetoric and performance, and writing pedagogy. She s particularly interested in popular US television and film and in the work of Tony Kushner and his contemporaries. Her work has appeared in Theatre Topics, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Liliana M. Naydan received her PhD in English from Stony Brook University and is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Abington. Her research centers on contemporary American literature, the literature and art of 9/11, rhetoric and composition, and religion. Her work on these subjects has appeared in several journals including The John Updike Review, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation. Her first book, Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction: Faith, Fundamentalism, and Fanaticism in the Age of Terror, was published with Bucknell University Press in Alison N. Novak received her PhD from Drexel University and is an Assistant Professor at Rowan University in Public Relations & Advertising. She studies journalistic framing and discursive practices that influence perceptions of identity. Her work explores how political engagement, age, and gender are discursively created and shared through traditional news media and social networking sites. She has previously published in Review

11 List of Contributors xiii of Communication, Journal of Information, Technology and Politics, and edited volumes such as Political Women: Language and Leadership and the Handbook of Research on Political Activism in the Information Age. Scott Ortolano is Professor of English at Florida SouthWestern State College where he is helping to establish a bachelor s degree in English. His scholarship focuses on the cognitive and existential repercussions of consumerism. He has recently published in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review and has a forthcoming article in Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World (Kent State University Press). He is also co-editor of Perspectives on the Short Story, an anthology of short fiction published by Pearson, a revised and expanded edition of which will be published this August. He is currently at work as a guest editor on a special issue of the South Atlantic Review. Jason Ramírez is a playwright, actor, and director holding memberships in Actors Equity Association, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, and the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors. He has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. Jason received his PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center and specializes in the intersection of Latino theatre and popular culture with an emphasis on commercial representations of latinidad. Currently, Dr. Ramírez is Assistant Academic Chairperson and Associate Professor of Communications at Suffolk County Community College, State University of New York. Mark A. Tabone is Lecturer in English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he teaches courses in American, African American, and world literatures, and in rhetoric and writing. His research focuses on the politics of social change and the representation of history in African- American and postcolonial literature. A full-length manuscript in progress examines utopia and dystopia in post-1960s fiction. Current or forthcoming essays discuss works by Samuel R. Delany, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead. Elizabeth Toohey is on the English faculty at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York, where she serves as Director of the Journalism program. A contributor to The Christian Science Monitor, she reviews books on film, women s studies, and American culture. Her teaching and research have been supported by the

12 xiv LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS National Endowment for the Humanities, New York Council for the Humanities, Helena Rubinstein Foundation, and Winchester Foundation. Previously an Associate Professor of English at Principia College, Professor Toohey designed and directed the New Orleans field-program, integrating cultural studies with volunteering after Hurricane Katrina. She has published and presented papers on Jane Austen and on contemporary film and literature. Erin Trapp holds a PhD from the University of California, Irvine, and is a Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her research interests include psychoanalysis, cultural poetics, and theories of the subject. Her work has appeared in journals including The Journal of Narrative Theory, Cultural Critique, and Modern Language Notes.

13 List of Figures Fig. 7.1 Crazy Horse, Lower East Side, Manhattan. Photo courtesy of the author 123 Fig. 7.2 Twin Towers with flower, Tribeca, New York, October Courtesy of LAN/Corbis 126 Fig The void in the skyline 213 Fig Walter at the detention center 221 Fig Surveillance at home 221 xv