REVERTING TO GREATNESS: WHITE -AMERICAN TRAUMA AND THE OCCLUSION OF MUSLIMS IN THE POST-9/11 ‘GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL’
Date
2023-07-13
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0009-0005-2912-9451
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Doctoral
Abstract
Don DeLillo, in his December 2001 Harper’s article, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” urged fellow American writers to create “the counternarrative” that would take back control of culture from terrorists who threatened it. DeLillo’s call for nation-rebuilding cultural production hearkens back to John William de Forest’s original post-Civil War coinage of the term and concept of the “Great American Novel”. Examining four seminal post-9/11 novels through the conceptual framework of a “new” Great American Novel oeuvre, I demonstrate a concerted effort by the authors to address what I have termed the “Muslim Question”. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), DeLillo’s own Falling Man (2007), Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011), and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) all feature traumatized white Americans creating a variety of mechanisms with which to mitigate the trauma of 9/11 as it resurges at even the thought of Muslims existing in America after 9/11. By examining the mechanisms of repression, appropriation, adversarial othering, and enforced secularization, I critically analyze the iterations of “solutions” while also demonstrating the abandonment of American ideals by the traumatized white Americans. The spectral, fluid, and slippery notion of the so-called Great American Novel looms in the background as a tradition within which each of these novels operates; and it provides the lens necessary to see literary concerns and depictions shifting in America after the terrorist attack. While the original concept of the Great American Novel featured novels with multifaceted explorations of the American Dream, the renewed interest in creating nation-rebuilding texts is threatening to stagnate and congeal particularly around examining the relative success of the mechanisms of occluding Muslims and Islam within and from the United States.
Description
Keywords
9/11 studies, American literature, post-9/11 novels, Islamophobia, Great American Novel, American exceptionalism
Citation
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
English
Program
English