The Writing of Terrorism: Contemporary American Fiction and Maurice Blanchot

Terrorism in 1990s novels by Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Bret Easton Ellis serves as a key trope to interrogate the limits of writing and the power of literature. Based on the thought of Maurice Blanchot, this study explores the writer's terrorist temptation, literature's negotiation of radical alterity, and novelistic elucidations of terrorism.

Terrorism has long been a popular subject for American fiction writers. This book argues that terrorism in 1990s novels by Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Bret Easton Ellis serves as a key trope to interrogate the limits of writing and the power of literature. Based on the complex literary and philosophical thought of Maurice Blanchot, this study deals with the writer's terrorist temptation, language's investment in violence, and literature's negotiation of radical alterity. Auster's, Roth's, and Ellis's novels elucidate contemporary political and economic developments as well as our cultural fear of, and fascination with, terrorism. The writing of terrorism can thus become the foundation of a different politics where, according to Maurice Blanchot, «there is no explosion except a book.»

Auteur

Christian Kloeckner teaches North American literature and culture at the University of Bonn. His research interests include literature and political violence, (post-)modernist poetry, memorial culture, discourses of race and class, and the intersections of financialization, debt, and nostalgia in U.S. culture.

Résumé
«In enlisting Blanchot's thinking in order to understand better the relation between literature and violence, Christian Kloeckner does not aim, however, to examine the thematic treatment of terrorism in selected novels as such, but rather 'to analyse [them] for the ways in which they relate terrorism to the act of writing and the question of literature's power' (p. 19). To this end, he offers an often astute, well-informed analysis of Auster's early prose and poetry, and tracks with illuminating persistence the trace left on Auster by his encounter with Blanchot.»
(Leslie Hill, French Studies Volume 72, Issue 1 2018)

Contenu

Terrorism in postmodern and neorealist American fiction - Maurice Blanchot - Paul Auster's debt to Blanchot - Aesthetics of rupture and transgression - Relationship of writing, terror, freedom, and death - Power of literature - Alterity - Emmanuel Levinas - The sublime - Terrorism as spectacle in global consumer culture