European Perspectives on the Literature of 9/11

Auteur(s) : Sylvie Mathé, Sophie Vallas, Collectif
Editeur : Michel Houdiard Editeur

Langue : Anglais

In the wake of 9/11, a dozen of European academics (French, British, Italian, Croatian and Spanish) are contemplating Lower Manhattan and its fictional representations from their transatlantic positions. Most of them first go back to Don DeLillo's incredulous, hesitating and yet determined voice rising from the smoldering ashes right after the attacks on New York in a groundbreaking text. Formulated at the heart of the very «Ruins of the Future», DeLillo's questions are less about the events themselves (although those planes are still out there in his mind, although the images they gave birth to are still imprinted on his retina) than about what the task of the writer will now be-to enter the towers, to muster the courage to stand by the people trapped in their offices, to find a language not to leave those who jumped into nothingness alone, «to imagine the moment, desperately.» The essays gathered in this collection explore DeLillo's own fiction facing 9/11, but also what paths Joseph O'Neill, Colum McCann, Ian McEwan, Patrick McGrath, John Updike, Siri Hustvedt, Richard Powers or Thomas Pynchon have been choosing in recent novels, and Martin Amis or Joyce Carol Oates among others in short stories. From their European shores the authors bring some of the most intense images linked to 9/11 into focus-the birth and death of the twin towers, the figures that fell into the void, the voices that remained suspended to a few phone lines, the broken lives and the various narratives that tried to fill in the «howling space.»

18,00 €
Parution : Mars 2014
137 pages
ISBN : 978-2-3569-2112-3