FSLT Proposal for ENGL 240, Literature after 9/11 Monika Siebert Department of English • Proposed field of study Literary study • Course number and title ENGL 240 • How this course fulfills the purpose of the field of study, as defined by the General Education Curriculum “Literature After 9/11” focuses on comparative textual analysis of a series of imaginative works written in response to 9/11, including poems, short stories, plays, novels, and essays. These works are considered in the historical context of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent international response. • Catalog description A study of selected works of imaginative literature written in response to September 11, 2001, including poetry, drama, short stories, novels and essays by writers from across the world. Focuses on the functions of art in mediating trauma in highly politicized historical contexts. • Course prerequisite(s) None • Full description of the course The early responses of American writers to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 converged in their despair at the failure of language to describe what transpired that day. “I have nothing to say,” wrote Toni Morrison, while Suheir Hammad found that “there have been no words./ no poetry in the ashes south of canal street./ 2 no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and dna./ not one word.” Like the European writers in the wake of World War II, who declared that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, many American writers saw 9/11 as an event that made language itself useless and literature irrelevant, if not impossible. Their international counterparts concurred: in 2002 Salman Rushdie confessed to struggling, “like every writer in the world…trying to find a way of writing after September 11” and Martin Amis claimed that “after a couple of hours at their desks on September 12, 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” And yet, in the years since, imaginative fiction attempting to grasp the meanings of September 11, and of the changed world it ushered, proliferated both in the United States and abroad. We will study this body of writing to understand how writers in the United States and abroad have variously responded to the challenge of depicting 9/11 and confronting the crisis of literary imagination that followed. We will read American and British drama, such as Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat and David Hare’s Stuff Happens, American fiction such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Deborah Eisenberg’s “The Twilight of the Superheroes,” Lynne Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall, Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and Amy Waldman’s The Submission along with works by British, French, Algerian, and Pakistani writers such as Frederic Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, Martin Amis’s “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul and a selection of non- fictional commentary by intellectuals from around the world. • Proposed syllabus Attached • Reading list • Neil LaBute, The Mercy Seat • David Hare, Stuff Happens • Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes 3 • Lynne Schwartz, The Writing on the Wall • Don DeLillo, Falling Man • Frederic Beigbeder, Windows on the World • Laird Hunt, The Exquisite • Jonathan Safran Foer, Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close • Slimane Benaissa, The Last Night of a Damned Soul • Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist • Amy Waldman, The Submission • Colson Whitehead, Zone One • Toni Morrison, “The Dead of September 11” • Suheir Hammad, “First Writing Since…” • Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future” • Slavoj Zizek, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” • Martin Amis, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” • Statement of course objectives “Literature After 9/11” offers a sharp thematic focus while encouraging students to reflect on how a major historical trauma affects our imaginative resources and reshapes how we think about the functions of creative fiction. It allows students to consider how cultural mediation of a historical trauma changes over time and to study how the popular and critical discourses evoked by subsequent anniversaries differ from those surrounding the original event. The course offers a unique opportunity to reflect on how the students, themselves, and how others, including intellectuals from around the world, think about the defining historical event of their generation and to do so by paying attention to literature in the context of a variety of different contemporary media, such as film, television, visual arts, and internet media. • Full details of how the course will be taught “Literature After 9/11” opens with a consideration of the earliest literary and critical responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, including poetry by Toni Morrison and Suheir Hamad, and critical essays by Don DeLillo and Slavoj Zizek. Next we study two plays, a political drama by a British playwright reconstructing the 4 period leading up to the declaration of the U.S. led “war on terror” and a play by an American author focusing on personal responses to the attacks of two New Yorkers to consider the relationship between the genre and the ideological implications of literature. Two short stories, again by a British (Martin Amis) and an American (Deborah Eisenberg) writer, follow suit, this time showcasing the repercussion of experimentation with narrative voice. The rest of the course focuses on the novel, featuring works by American (DeLillo, Schwartz, Foer, Laird, Whitehead, Waldman), French (Beigbeder), Moroccan (Benaissa), and Pakistani (Hamid) writers, and ranging from realist depictions of the event, to far reaching narrative experimentation aimed at representing the “unimaginable” of the event, to allegorical treatment of the 9/11 fallout, and to questions of public commemoration of 9/11. Throughout we pay particular attention to the question of language and representation in the context of historical trauma, the potential functions of art in mediating trauma, and to the ideological functions of artistic expression in highly politicized historical contexts. Alongside literature, we study photography (the controversy over the “Falling Man” photograph and its censoring in public media), experimental video (Alejandro Inarritu’s September 11), visual art (September 11 exhibition at the MOMA on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the attacks), and architecture and public art (The National 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero in downtown Manhattan) to consider what is uniquely specific about literary attempts at representing 9/11. • Number of units One unit • Typical estimated enrollment Twenty students per section • How often and by whom the course will be offered Monika Siebert, once every two years 5 • Staffing implications for the school/department/unit None; the course has been taught twice since the Fall 2011 semester as a special topics course; and it has always been enrolled to capacity, often with a waiting list. • Adequacy of library, technology and other resources No new materials or resources needed • Any interdepartmental and interschool implications The course will be cross-listed with the American Studies program. Contact person Monika Siebert [email protected] SYLLABUS ENGL 299 (3 & 5): Literature After 9/11 TTh 3:00-4:15pm (section 3) Ryland 204 TTh 4:30-5:45pm (section 5) Ryland 204 Monika Siebert Email: [email protected] office: 303-K Ryland Phone: 289-8311 office hours: Tuesdays 2-3pm, Wednesdays 6-7pm, and by appointment There is a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists…Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of a culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. --Don DeLillo Artworks, unlike terrorists, change nothing. 6 --Salman Rushdie. The early responses of American writers to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 converged in their despair at the failure of language to describe what transpired that day. “I have nothing to say,” wrote Toni Morrison, while Suheir Hammad found that “there have been no words./ no poetry in the ashes south of canal street./ no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and dna./ not one word.” Like the European writers in the wake of World War II, who declared that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, many American writers saw 9/11 as an event that made language itself useless and literature irrelevant, if not impossible. Their international counterparts concurred: in 2002 Salman Rushdie confessed to struggling, “like every writer in the world…trying to find a way of writing after September 11” and Martin Amis claimed that “after a couple of hours at their desks on September 12, 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” And yet, in the twelve years since, imaginative fiction attempting to grasp the meanings of September 11, and of the changed world it ushered, proliferated both in the United States and abroad. We will study this body of writing to understand how writers in the United States and abroad have variously responded to the challenge of depicting 9/11 and confronting the crisis of literary imagination that followed. We will read American and British drama, such as Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat and David Hare’s Stuff Happens, American fiction such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Deborah Eisenberg’s “The Twilight of the Superheroes,” Lynne Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall, Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and Amy Waldman’s The Submission along with works by British, French, Algerian, and Pakistani writers such as Frederic Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, Martin Amis’s “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul and a selection of non-fictional commentary by intellectuals from around the world.