Uppsatsens syfte är att studera porträtteringen av nationell identitet i Don DeLillos Falling Man och Amy Waldmans The Submission i förhållande till efterverkningarna av 9/11. Studien utgörs av undersökande och jämförande analyser av romanerna utifrån ett litteratursociologiskt samt postkolonialt perspektiv med fokus på nationalism, religion och commemoration.   Studien har presenterat hur amerikansk identitet har ifrågasatts och problematiserats i romanerna Falling Man och The Submission, och visat hur religion, commemoration och nationalism hänger samman med den amerikanska identiteten. En identitet som visat sig föränderlig och problematisk i efterverkningarna av 9/11. Studien har också kunnat visa att böckerna inte ämnar att lyfta fram en gestaltning av identitet som något allenarådande eller fast, utan att de istället visar hur identitet ständigt förändras och skiljer sig från karaktär till karaktär, genom problematiserandet kring tillhörighet, trygghet och trauma.

Made available in DSpace on 2017-03-14T14:10:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2012-02-17. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2017-03-14T14:42:42Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000685750.pdf: 67781 bytes, checksum: 3c54d1cb16730767c0361aa0d3ec3549 (MD5) Bitstreams deleted on 2017-07-28T12:36:26Z: 000685750_20161231.pdf,. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2017-07-28T12:37:14Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000685750.pdf: 55765135 bytes, checksum: 4bf6c4444b278ebc053c3f7c0ff2844b (MD5) Bitstreams deleted on 2017-08-07T14:09:17Z: 000685750.pdf,. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2017-08-07T14:10:21Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000685750.pdf: 55765135 bytes, checksum: 4bf6c4444b278ebc053c3f7c0ff2844b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:29:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2012-02-17Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:39:38Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 mariano_mco_me_sjrp_parcial.pdf: 61686 bytes, checksum: 85be7b5b66db2f567cf2e052286f85d3 (MD5) Bitstreams deleted on 2015-02-09T14:35:41Z: mariano_mco_me_sjrp_parcial.pdf,Bitstream added on 2015-02-09T14:36:21Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000685750_20161231.pdf: 1506390 bytes, checksum: 5a7c60850c69475431d99fde8a4b98d6 (MD5) Bitstreams deleted on 2015-02-09T17:15:04Z: 000685750_20161231.pdf,Bitstream added on 2015-02-09T17:15:41Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000685750_20161231.pdf: 1506390 bytes, checksum: 5a7c60850c69475431d99fde8a4b98d6 (MD5) / Item merged in doublecheck by Luiz Galeffi (luizgaleffi@gmail.com) on 2017-07-26T12:49:03Z Item was identical to item(s): 149682, 98273 at handle(s): http://hdl.handle.net/11449/149233, http://hdl.handle.net/11449/99137 / Os atentados de 11 de setembro originaram diversas manifestações artísticas buscando não apenas explicações para a tragédia, mas também tentando repensar os acontecimentos. Neste sentido, esta pesquisa apresenta uma investigação a respeito da maneira como um romance e um documentário se apropriaram desse episódio para reavaliá-lo. Com os ataques, os Estados Unidos experimentaram uma forte sensação de vulnerabilidade, desencadeando reações do governo americano, que formulou com bastante rapidez uma nova doutrina de segurança nacional, baseada no combate ao terrorismo. Esta dissertação analisa as estratégias narrativas utilizadas pelo autor americano Don DeLillo no romance Falling Man (2007), e pelo cineasta Michael Moore, no documentário Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), e como eles abordam fatores históricos, socioeconômicos e políticos que desencadearam a tragédia, a fim de reexaminá-la. Textos teóricos e críticos sobre a relação entre Literatura e História, ficção Pós-Moderna, aspectos do documentário e questões sobre terrorismo fundamentam as discussões apresentadas no trabalho. Este estudo objetiva ampliar os questionamentos acerca dos fatos que levaram à catástrofe e suas consequências, examinando personagens e grupos ligados ao 11 de setembro, revelando múltiplas verdades, condicionadas social, ideológica e historicamente / September 11 has originated a wide range of artistic manifestations which have not only searched for plausible explanations for the tragedy, but also tried to review the events. In this sense, this thesis aims at showing how a novel and a documentary reevaluate this episode. The attacks made the United States experience a strong sense of vulnerability, triggering reactions from the American government, who quickly established a new national security strategy, associated with the war on terror. This thesis analyzes the narrative strategies employed by the American author Don DeLillo in his novel Falling Man (2007) and by the filmmaker Michael Moore in the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), as well as the way they approach socioeconomic and political factors that caused the tragedy in order to reevaluate it. The debate of the topics is based on texts concerning the relationship between literature and history, postmodern fiction, documentary aspects and issues on terrorism. This study contributes to enrich the discussion related to the events that led to the catastrophe and its aftermath, examining characters and groups linked to the September 11 terrorist attacks, revealing multiple truths subjected to social, ideological and historical conditions

Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the themes of representation and identity in four post-9/11 novels: Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. The novels of Hosseini and Hamid represent the experience of two Muslim protagonists from Afghanistan and Pakistan who immigrate to the US. The protagonists offer two contrasting understandings of fundamentalism, using this lens to understand the terrorist figure and American society respectively. The construction of power for both the American society and the terrorist is argued to be located in images which are linked to masculinity: money, sport, militancy, sex and religious devotion. The personal experiences of these protagonists reflect the political circumstances which they encounter, and both characters identify with national identities in ways which relate to their readings of representations of identity and news media. Beigbeder and DeLillo’s novels are discussed using the theme of trauma. The novels portray the experiences of American characters who are confronted with 9/11 and suffer from disorientation and loss. The negotiation of this loss takes place in relation to entanglements with the terrorist figure, who penetrates the physical and psychological spaces of these characters. Images of masculinity are evoked in order to signify this loss of power, where the destabilising of the paternal role is linked to the pervasive sense of vulnerability which the characters experience after the attacks. Memorials and rituals become ways of dealing with disorientation. The two novels unsettle the distinction between terrorist and terrorised in order to negotiate a new American identity after 9/11. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis ondersoek temas van representasie en identiteit in vier post-9/11 romans, naamlik Khaled Hosseini se The Kite Runner, Mohsin Hamid se The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Frédéric Beigbeder se Windows on the World en Don DeLillo se Falling Man. Hosseini en Hamid se romans verbeeld die ervarings van twee Muslim-protagoniste, onderskeidelik afkomstig van Afghanistan en Pakistan wat na die VSA immigreer. Hierdie protagoniste verbeeld twee uiteenlopende beskouïngs van fundamentalisme wat gevolglik aangewend word om die terroris-figuur en die Amerikaanse gemeenskap te verstaan. Die konstruksie van mag vir die Amerikaanse gemeenskap en die terroris-figuur word getoon, is geleë in beelde wat verband hou met manlikheid, naamlik geld, sport, militarisme, seks en toegewydheid. Die persoonlike ervarings van hierdie protagoniste weerspieël die politieke omstandighede waarmee hulle kennis maak. Beide hierdie karakters vereenselwig hulself met nasionale identiteite op grond van hul begrip van representasie van identiteit en die media. Beigbeder en DeLillo se romans word volgens die tema van trauma vergelyk. Hierdie romans beeld die ervarings van Amerikaanse karakters wat met 9/11 gekonfronteer word en met disoriëntasie en verlies worstel, uit. Die oorweging van hierdie verlies vind plaas in verhouding tot ontmoetings met die terroris-figuur wat die fisiese en psigiese ruimtes van hierdie karakters binnedring. Voorstellings van manlikheid word opgeroep om die verlies van mag ten toon te stel. Hierdie verlies van mag word gekenmerk deur die destabilisering van die vaderlike rol tesame met die diepgaande sin van weerloosheid wat die karakters na die aanval ervaar. Gedenktekens en rituele word vervolgens instellings om met die disoriëntasie om te gaan. Uiteindelik problematiseer die twee romans die onderskeid tussen terroris en geterroriseerde om sodoende ’n nuwe Amerikaanse identiteit ná 9/11 tot stand te bring.

Al Qaeda killings, posttraumatic stress, and the Gothic together triangulate a sizable space in recent American fiction that is still largely uncharted by critics. This thesis maps that shared territory in four novels written between 2005 and 2007 by writers who were born in America, and whose protagonists are the survivors in New York City after the World Trade Center falls. Published in the city of their tragedy and reviewed in its media, the novels surveyed here include Don DeLillo’s _Falling Man_ (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer’s _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_ (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s _The Writing on the Wall_ (2005), and Jess Walter’s _The Zero_ (2006). The thesis issues a challenge to the large number of negative and dismissive reviews of the novels under consideration, making a case that under different criteria, shaped by trauma theory and psychoanalysis, the novels succeed after all in making readers feel what it was to be alive in September 2001, enduring the posttraumatic stress for months and years later. The thesis asserts that 9/11 fiction is too commonly presented in popular journals and scholarly studies as an undifferentiated mass. In the same critical piece a journalist or an academic may evaluate narratives in which unfold a terrorist's point of view, a surviving or a dying New York City victim's perspective, and an outsider's reaction set thousands of miles away from Ground Zero. What this thesis argues for is a separation in study of the fictive strands that meditate on the burning towers, treating the New York City survivor story as a discrete body. Despite their being set in one of the most known cities of the Western world, and the terrorist attack that they depict being the most- watched catastrophe ever experienced in real-time before, these fictions have not yet been critically ordered. Charting the salient reappearing conflicts, unsettling descriptions, protagonist decay, and potent techniques for registering horror that resurface in this New York City 9/11 fiction, this thesis proposes and demonstrates how the peculiar and affecting Gothic tensions in the works can be further understood by trauma theory, a term coined by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996: 72). Though the thesis concentrates on developments in trauma theory from the mid 1990s to 2015, it also addresses its theoretical antecedents: from the earliest voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked mental illness to a trauma (Charcot, Janet, Breuer, Freud), to researchers from mid-twentieth century (Adler, Lindemann) who studied how catastrophe affects civilian minds not previously trained to either fight war or withstand cataclysm. Always keeping at the fore the ancient Greek double-meaning of trauma as both unhealing “wound” and “defeat,” the thesis surveys tenets of the trauma theorists from the very first of those who studied the effects on civilian survivors of disaster (of what is still the largest nightclub fire in U.S. history, which replaced front page coverage of World War II for a few days: the Cocoanut Grove blaze in Boston, 1942) up to those theorists writing in 2015. The concepts evolving behind trauma theory, this thesis demonstrates, provide a useful mechanism to discuss the surprising yearnings hiding behind the appearance of doppelgängers, possession ghosts, terrorists as monsters, empty coffins, and visitants that appear to feed on characters’ sorrow, guilt, and loneliness within the novels under discussion. This thesis reappraises the dominant idea in trauma studies of the mid-1990s, namely that trauma victims often cannot fully remember and articulate their physical and psychic wounds. The argument here is that, true to the theories of the Caruthian school, the victims in these novels may not remember and express their trauma completely and in a linear fashion. However, the victims figured in these novels do relate the horrors of their memory to a degree by letting their narration erupt with the unexpectedly Gothic images, tropes, visions, language, and typical contradictions, aporias, lacunae, and paradoxes. The Gothic, one might say, becomes the language in which trauma speaks and articulates itself, albeit not always in the most cogent of signs. One might easily dismiss these fleeting Gothic presences that characters conjure in the fictions under consideration as anomalous apparitions signalling nothing. However, this thesis interrogates these ghostly traces of Gothicism to find what secrets they hold. Working from the insights of psychoanalysis and its post-Freudian re-inventers and challengers, it aims to puzzle out the dimensions of characters’ mourning in its “traumagothic” reading of the texts. Characters’ use of the Gothic becomes their way of remembering, a coded language to the curious. This thesis holds that unexpressed grief and guilt are the large constant in this grouping of novels. Characters’ grief articulation and guilt release, or the desire for symbolic amnesia, take paths that the figures often were suspicious of before 9/11: a return to organized religion, a belief in spirits, a call for vengeance, psychotherapy, substance abuse, splitting with a partner, rampant sex with nearby strangers, torture of suspects, and killing. All the earnest attempts through the above means by the characters to express grief, vent rage, and alleviate survivor guilt do so without noticeable success. True closure towards their trauma is largely a myth. No reliable evidence surfaces from the close reading of the texts that those affected by trauma ever fully recover. However, as this thesis demonstrates, other forms of recompense come from these searches for elusive peace and the nostalgic longing for the America that has been lost to them.