The heart of the West: 9/11, the insider/outsider novel, and Worlding America
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Abstract
The cruelness and unexpectedness of the September 11, 2001 attacks shook the whole world. Critics and scholars agreed that the tragedy could not be put into words and denied authors of fiction the ability of writing about it in any meaningful way. At the same time, especially American authors felt the pressure to write nothing less than the great 9/11 novel. In 2003, French author Frédéric Beigbeder was the first novelist to deal with the subject. American authors took more time to find the words to write about the tragedy. A first attempt was made by Jonathan Safran Foer in 2005 with the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Since 2007, authors from South Asia have picked up the topic, too. The aim of this study is to set novelistic approaches from the USA, France, and South Asia into dialogue. Expanding on existing readings of the 9/11 novel, this study will argue that while scholars and critics expected and even demanded a radically different aesthetic to do justice to this watershed moment in history, quite the opposite happened in literature since novelists followed the trend of domestic realism, a tendency that was observable already prior to the terrorist attacks throughout the 1990s, combining it with postmodernist aesthetics. Hence, thematic newness is combined with aesthetically familiar forms: the domestic theme translates into realism and the attacks’ hyperreality is expressed by combining it with elements of autofiction, magical realism, fragmentation, unreliable narrators, metafiction, or the inclusion of other genres.