ORCID Identifier(s)

0000-0001-6964-9076

Graduation Semester and Year

2017

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Kenneth M. Roemer

Abstract

The cultural, political, and historical impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as an event, continues to be questioned. For this project, I will examine six “one-off” or “one-time” works of speculative fiction from highly-acclaimed and award-winning writers— Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), and Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet (2012) —who, prior to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, all worked predominantly in creating works in the genre of realist fiction. In writing works of speculative fiction during what has been deemed the “age of terror,” these writers, through cognitive estrangement, have developed works in separate generic spaces where the intersection of event and corporeality collide (in what Ilai Rowner refers to as the “literary event”). In doing so, they examine not only the repercussions of a post-9/11 world, but they also present warnings against future events that now resonate globally. The crossing of these writers from realism to genre or speculative fiction is an act of artistic and historical refraction, a change of direction from one medium to another; in other words, they are works representative of the “disruptive nature of genre fiction.” Considering the spectacle of 9/11 and the creation of these texts in the wake of the tragedy, I will focus most of my attention on examining these texts through the theoretical lens of “the event” and event theory as presented in Ilai Rowner’s 2015 study, The Event: Literature and Theory, which focuses on establishing a theory of the “literary event” influenced by an amalgam of event theories and definitions from Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, and Deleuze. Rowner’s approach attempts to establish a theoretical set of questions that will illuminate the role of the event in literature by identifying and analyzing the intersections of language and corporeality within an event. Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, understanding the overall impact of an “event,” be it a single individual accomplishment or global tragedy, has likely never been more important than in the 21st century. I argue here that September 11th, as a historical event and spectacle, created an initial indistinguishability of reality and non-reality, which I believe provided an event-inspired gateway for these six novelists to make their generic leap from realist works to the genre of speculative fiction and, more specifically, the subgenres of alternate history, dystopia, and post-apocalyptic fiction.

Keywords

Dystopia, Speculative fiction, 9/11

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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