Terrorism and American Literature

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: In his essay "e;'God save us from the bourgeois adventure': TheFigure of the Terrorist in Contemporary American Conspiracy Fiction"e;(1996), written in the aftermath of the 1993 attack on the World TradeCenter, Steffen Hantke remarks how quickly politicians, the media, andthe public at that time agreed that the bombing had to be understood aspart of a larger confrontation between Western democracies and 'IslamicFundamentalism' (for the following comp. 1996: 219-222). He goes on toargue that the then newly discovered enemy 'Islamic terrorism' had filledthe vacancy in the collective political imagination that was left by thedemise of Communism in the late 1980ies, and that this new conflictcontinued the kind of cultural paranoia that had sustained the historicalnarrative of the Cold War era. Hantke describes cultural paranoia as theeffect of a cultural machinery that amalgamates complex political contextsand historical developments into homogeneous and larger-than-lifecultural abstractions against which the collective political imagination canconstruct itself as a unified entity. In other words, cultural paranoiacreates a sprawling narrative of the nation/the American way oflife/Western civilization under threat that legitimizes state power, ensurescompliance with dominant social norms and unifies the nation bystigmatizing dissent as treason.