Literature after 9/11

Ann Keniston is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada-Reno, and is the author of Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry (Routledge 2006), and a poetry collection, The Caution of Human Gestures (David Robert, 2005). Jeanne Follansbee Quinn is director of studies for the Program in History and Literature at Harvard University and has published essays on James Agee and Walker Evans, Richard Wright and American pragmatism. She is completing a book on anti-fascist aesthetics in the United States during the 1930s, Democratic Aesthetics: Popular Front Anti-Fascism.

'Literature After 9/11 can be seen as a barometer of the vitality of its critical field. In spite of the diversity of the essays, the book never loses sight of its overarching theoretical approach, namely to situate 9/11 and its immediate impact within existing discourses.'- Ulrike Tancke

• Acknowledgments Introduction: "Representing 9/11: Literature and Resistance," Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn Part One: Experiencing 9/11: Time, Trauma, and the Incommensurable EventChapter 1: "Portraits of Grief: Telling Details and the New Genres of Testimony," Nancy K. Miller Chapter 2: "Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11’s Timely Traumas," Mitchum Huehls Chapter 3: "Graphic Implosion: Politics, Time, and Value in Post-9/11 Comics," Simon Cooper and Paul Atkinson Chapter 4: "‘Sometimes Things Disappear’: Absence and Mutability in Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York," Stephanie Li Chapter 5: "Witnessing 9/11: Art Spiegelman and the Persistence of Trauma," Richard Glejzer Part Two: 9/11 Politics and RepresentationChapter 6: "Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private in Post-9/11 Literature," Michael Rothberg Chapter 7: "‘We’re not a friggin’ girl band’: September 11, Masculinity, and the British-American Relationship in David Hare’s Stuff Happens and Ian McEwan’s Saturday," Rebecca Carpenter Chapter 8: "‘We’re the culture that cried wolf’: Discourse and Terrorism in Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby," Lance Allen Rubin Chapter 9: "Still Life: 9/11’s Falling Bodies," Laura Frost Part Three: 9/11 and the Literary TraditionChapter 10: "Telling It Like It Isn’t," David Simpson Chapter 11: "Portraits 9/11/01: The New York Times and the Pornography of Grief," Simon Stow Chapter 12: "Theater after 9/11," Robert Brustein Chapter 13: "Real Planes and Imaginary Towers: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America as 9/11 Prosthetic Screen," Charles Lewis Chapter 14: "Precocious Testimony: Poetry and the Uncommemorable," Jeffrey GrayAfterword: "Imagination and Monstrosity," Robert Pinsky Contributors Index