230095 Genres, Authors, Periods: Post 9/11 Literature (S) (WiSe 2024/2025)

In the days and weeks after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001, a number of writers asked what the future of fiction could be after such a rupture. ‘9/11’ has evoked manifold literary responses in form of short stories, novels, testimonios, blogs, or graphic novels.
In this seminar, we will examine the literary and cultural discourses that have emerged in relation with and in the aftermaths of this event and the representations evolving from it. Based on a close analysis of central tropes, motifs, and diverse positions and viewpoints represented in the texts, the seminar further addresses the impact ‘9/11’ had on people of different social positions. We also look at the international impact of ‘9/11’ as a global media event such as the impact of the wars and geopolitics following it. We will also look at texts written by Arab-Americans in the context of the 'War on Terror' and detainees at the military camp in Guantánamo, Cuba.

The seminar aims at providing students with key competences in analysing the wide range of ‘9/11’ texts, including critical close reading and academic writing skills. The seminar will take a close look at a number of examples from the rapidly expanding canon of 9/11 novels and short stories, but also examine selected work in other genres and media by authors of diverse positions. Negotiating ‘9/11’ across genres (and media), students also train their intercultural competence and learn some key terms from cultural studies, and poststructural and postcolonial approaches. Throughout, the seminar seeks to consider literature’s perspective on the events of 9/11 – as well as on the relationship between politics, representation and narrative – as a focalizer for the project of constructing identities, both “American” and trans-national. It equips students with the tools to read these representations and perspectives critically, reflect and evaluate the contexts they originated and transfer/contrast them to their own positioning.

Course requirements:
– regular attendance, active in-class participation (minimum of 3 preparations and their presentation in class)
– preparatory reading of texts
– prepare and present atopic for the final session(s)

Literaturangaben

Christian Kloeckner: “Literature and Poetry after 9/11” in: Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies, ed. By ulia Straub, Berlin Boston: De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 116-134.(16 p.)

Katharina Donn: “Records to be made? Silence and Testimony” from: A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11: Representing Trauma in a Digitized Present, 2017, pp. 77-83 (6 p.)