This conference will investigate American literature's engagement with the politics surrounding 9/11, exploring formal and ideological developments in American writing across this period, the changing priorities and themes of specific authors, and the impact of visual culture on American writing.
Before and After 9/11: American Literature and Culture
Schedule
9.30 Welcome
9.45-11.15
1a: Otherness after 9/11
A.G.Keeble - Otherness and Allegory in 25th Hour and The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Nilufa Junaideen - The Other as an enemy image in post 9/11 film
Meriem El Majeri - The Enemy Other in Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
1b: The Falling Man
Ruth Mackay – Man on Wire and Phillippe Petit’s Wire-walk After 9/11
Lucy Bond - Falling man, rising state: trauma transcended in post-9/11 America
Irene Musumeci – Falling Men: A Visual History Before and After 9/11
Break
11.45-1.15
2a: Don DeLillo
Martyn Colebrook – Language and Representation in the post-9/11 Landscape: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
Christina Rickli - Trapped in Trauma: Don Delillo and 9/11
Brian Jarvis - Falling Men
2b: Visual Culture after 9/11
Birte Otten – Inglorious Basterds in Inglorious Times: 9/11 and Alternate History
John A. Scanlan – Post-9/11 Counter-Narratives in the Aftermath of Abu Ghraib
Mandala White – Terror Tourism: Representations of Photography in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent
Lunch
2.15-3.15 Liam Kennedy: 'Seeing and Believing: On Photography and Post-9/11 Visual Culture'
Break
3.30-5.00
3a: The Novel after 9/11
Liz Powell – America Cracking Apart: Elements of Noir in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark
Veronique Bragard – Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic visions of the future
Margaret Scanlan – Dystopia Revisited: Pacifism in Attwood’s Year of the Flood
3b: Reimagining 9/11
Rachel Sykes – “All the forgettings that preceded my own”: public and private memory of 9/11
A. Sameh El Kharbawy - Empire, Culture and the Question of Modernity
Alasdair Spark – Truthers and Tea Parties: Conspiracy Theories Before and After 9/11
5pm Reception
