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A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11

Citation:

Sicher, Efraim, and Natalia Skradol. 2006. “A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11”. Partial Answers 4(1): 151-179. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244588.

Abstract:

In the aftermath of 9/11, dystopian nightmare has become a fact, no longer a cautionary tale of the imagination. But fantasy of destruction is embedded in Western culture, and apocalyptic disaster becomes a re-visioning of familiar cultural paradigms and scenarios. Indeed, postwar America as satirized by Don DeLillo was a site of catastrophe before the planes struck the WTC. The attacks on New York can be seen against the background of postmodern aesthetic theory expounded by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Frédéric Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Safran Foer respond to 9/11 in novels that grapple with the implications of that event and its aftermath for representation and for the novel form. What 9/11 has shown is that the relation of the real and the imagined in dystopian fiction has been reversed, as both lived experience and hypermediated image.

 

January 2006: Efraim Sicher teaches English and comparative literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva. His fields of research are dystopian fiction, English and Russian literature, and modern Jewish culture. He is the author of Jews in Russian Literature (1995; reissued 2005), Rereading the City / Rereading Dickens (2003), and The Holocaust Novel (2005), and the editor of Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz (1998) and Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry and Other Stories (reissued 2005). In 2004-2005 he was a Visiting Researcher at the English Department, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.



January 2006: Natalia Skradol is a freelance translator in Tel Aviv. Her doctoral dissertation, Tropes of the Body and the Organic in the Press of Nazi Germany, Based on an Analysis of the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Voelkischer Beobachter of the Years 1933-1945 (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2003), is a pioneering study of the rhetoric of totalitarian mass media from the perspective of politically oriented psychoanalysis. She has published on totalitarian discourse, postmodern film, and German-Jewish philosophy and has completed a book-length study of constructions of the body in the Nazi press. She is currently working on a study of laughter and public show trials in Stalinist Russia.

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 4, issue 1 Narrative as a Way of Thinking
Last updated on 04/18/2020