Narrative Innovation in 9/11 Fiction [antikvár]

IntroductionNarrative Innovation in 9/11 FictionThe large volume of published literary texts touching upon the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States reveals an imperative to tell the story of what happened on that fateful day, focusing almost exclusively on the World Trade Center New York City.1 While this narrative impulse cuts across genres, novelists understandably have been particularly invested in creating narratives as a means of representing the events of 9/11 and their after-effects on both individuals and the culture at large. Within the specific context of the United States, many novelists appeared to feel that writing about 9/11 was simply unavoidable. After all, since serious novelists in effect function as painters in words of their culture, how could they choose not to write about such a major event with such grave repercussions? Perhaps as a consequence of such sentiments, a large number of twenty-first-century American novels use the events of 9/11 as a backdrop for the stories they tell, even if these stories quite often do not focus specifically on the terrorist attacks themselves or their immediate socio-political aftermaths, or at the very least integrate mention of the attacks into their narratives.2 Such prominent novels in which the events of 9/11 serve primarily as a backdrop to stories that essentially focus more specifically on human relationships include Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children (2006), Jay1 Most literary texts focus on the attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and not on the attack on the Pentagon in Washington DC or the hijacked plane that went down in Pennsylvania, arguably because of the intense media focus on the towers and their falls - and the visual images that this media focus ingrained in spectators - and because of the higher death toll in New York.Birgit Dawes makes a related point when she notes that, in what she terms Ground Zero fiction, "The complexities of what happened on the hijacked planes, inside and around the World Trade Center, and in Washington, are therefore often replaced by textual silence" (Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel, Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter GmbH, 2011, 106).