Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-246) and index.
Contents:
Introduction -- Richard Ford and Ian McEwan: transactors and redeemers -- Narratives of retrogenesis and abstraction -- Paul Auster: after the past -- The long view -- The end of the decade -- Coda: in the realm of the real.
Summary:
Writing the 9/11 Decade" investigates the relation of the novel to reportage, and the role of both in shaping culture, by looking at novelists' journalistic responses to 9/11. Journalist, academic and literary critic Charlie Lee-Potter argues that novelists were entrapped by the expectation that they would provide an immediate non-fiction response to the September 11 attacks. Jonathan Lethem expressed the plaintive view that 'most of the novelists in New York were asked by one magazine or another to write something, and to me it seems our voices, at that moment, blended into one vast impotent scream'. Beginning with an examination of the sometimes mawkish literary journalism that emerged in the days after the attacks, Writing the 9/11 Decade traces its evolution-in writers such as Ian McEwan, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Mohsin Hamid, and Nadeem Aslam-into new literary methods of subsuming the disaster, while attempting to stand apart from it. In assessing the novel's capacity to respond to and contain an unimagined traumatic event, "Writing the 9/11 Decade" stands as a contemporary history of the form.
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