Post 9/11 literature

New York, 11 septembre 2001 : les caméras de CNN, aussitôt relayées par les chaînes du monde entier, se braquent sur les deux tours du World Trade Center et rendent compte par l'image et en direct d'attaques inimaginables, comme si le contrechamp mental de l'Amérique et sa mythologie se réalisait sous les yeux ébahis d'un monde globalisé. Inimaginables ? Une étrange sensation de déjà-vu renvoie pourtant le téléspectateur à sa propre mémoire de cinéma, brouillant irrémédiablement sa perception du réel. Que voit-on alors sur les écrans du monde entier ? L'inimaginable vérité d'une réalité ou bien le sequel d'une mémoire imaginée à Hollywood ?
Just Like the Movies est un court-métrage de 21 minutes, réalisé en 2006 par Michal Kosakowski, qui donne corps à ce sentiment de déjà-vu en matérialisant cet « arrière-plan fantasmatique sans lequel cet événement n'aurait pas eu une telle portée » . En effet, toutes les séquences de ce court-métrage sont tirées de blockbusters hollywoodiens réalisés avant les attentats du 11-septembre et montées de manière à reconstituer le déroulement linéaire de cette journée, et à détourner ainsi les images de notre mémoire collective.
A partir de ce film et du dévoiement des images qu’il opère, nous proposons d’analyser la mise en miroir de la fiction dans la réalité, dont le 11-septembre ne serait que la version renouvelée d’un fantasme de catastrophe, ces images bien réelles n’étant in fine que la reprise, le palimpseste visuel d’images fictionnelles déjà imprimées sur pellicule. Dans le sillage du simulacre de Baudrillard et du réel fantasmatique de Žižek, nous tenterons ainsi de démontrer en dernière analyse que les images déplacées (pratique définie ailleurs comme « appropriationnisme ») peuvent aussi peut-être renvoyer à une hallucination d’images déplacées, à entendre ici dans son deuxième sens moral d’inconvenance.

This essay seeks out to explain the history of the Military-Industrial Complex and how it may have existed in another form before the term itself was coined by former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower. This essay will then argue on why the military-industrial complex is reinforced and is now embedded into U.S. governance and policy.

In 11/9/2001, the whole world, was astounded to hear the news of the World
Trade Center's destruction and collapse. On this day, the city of New York mourned,
not only for the lives of people who died in these buildings, but also the for the loss of
one of the landmarks of the 21st century. Since then, the pain, the suffering and the
feelings of agony and anger, took many different forms.
The purpose of this research paper, is to analyze the forms in which, one of the
greatest disasters, was depicted through the art of fiction, the art of poetry and the art
of comics and graphic novels. The main criteria for the works chosen, will be the
cconcept of trauma and how its depicted.
In the first part, there will be a short reference to the main event, that was the
reason which gave birth to the works, that will be analyzed later on.
The second part will include one crucial work of fiction (Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer) and a partial analysis on how 9/11 trauma
concept, was depicted in that story.
The third part will include one poem (Last words” by Michael Symmons
Roberts) written after the time of the tragedy.
The fourth and last part will include 1 graphic novel (Heroes: The World's
Greatest Super Hero Creators Honor The World's Greatest Heroes 9-11-2001 by Kurt
Busiek, Paul Dini, Kevin Smith, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman etc.), created in order to
honour the real heroes of the society and their sacrifices in the face of danger.

Après l'attaque du 11 septembre les États-Unis ont battu le rappel du monde entier pour combattre le soi-disant terrorisme international. Dans les faits, ils ont, tout seuls, déchaîné une campagne militaire contre l'Afghanistan et une opération globale d'espionnage. L'attaque sur le sol américain, prise en elle-même, est certainement du terrorisme, comme prise en elle-même, l'attaque contre l'Afghanistan est certainement la guerre. D'où quelques théorisations sur les conflits soi-disant asymétriques. L'attaque terroriste qui exposa à quel point est vulnérable le géant impérialiste serait asymétrique; l'opération de guerre de la puissante "Amerika" contre les "masses islamiques opprimées" serait asymétrique. Pour nous, une asymétrie réelle existe seulement entre la puissance des États-Unis, celle des leurs concurrents Europe et Japon et celle des bourgeoisies émergentes dans le reste du monde, islamistes ou moins.

"http://rhr.dukejournals.org/content/2011/111/184.full.pdf+html


The 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States has become one of the most represented disasters in history since it produced an unprecedented visual impact on those around the world who watched the second plane crash into the South Tower live on television. In an atmosphere in which reality resembled fiction, fiction was initially rejected as a suitable means for understanding and relating to the enormity of the events because it apparently had nothing to offer that journalism and the news could not provide. Ten years later, these initial misgivings have been overcome and 9/11 fiction has become a genre in itself. This essay explores the use of newspaper articles, radio transcripts, phone messages, e-mails, and interviews with eyewitnesses in Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World (2004); the use of moving images—a flip book—and other visuals inserted in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005); and the references to well-known photographs of 9/11 in Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007). These authors do not ignore the mediated nature of 9/11 but display it through the incorporation of other media in their fiction, which renders their representation of the trauma more effective."

After the end of the Cold War, the second world disappeared, and the post-socialist space became a silent non-region. A close look at representations of pre-war Afghanistan and more specifically representations of its socialist period in contemporary global Anglophone literature reveals a cartography of silences and evasions related to the difficulty of depicting socialism outside of the discourses of its historical failure. At the same time, examining and explicitly addressing these impasses presents a wealth of new possibilities for representation and articulation. In this paper, I discuss representations of the Soviet invasion in three Anglophone novels – Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, M.E. Hirsh’s Kabul, and Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil. These three texts, I argue, exemplify three divergent strategies of imagining Afghanistan’s past, and consequently offer a path towards imagining its future as well as the future of the globe. I argue that representations of the Soviet invasion of 1979 serve as a pivotal lens through which the global community of readers is asked to understand the role of the US in contemporary geopolitical configurations, interpret the legacy of the Cold War, and evaluate the viability of alternative political projects in the twenty-first century – that is, it signals the way in which we make sense of our collective future.

In his celebrated nonfiction narrative Zeitoun (2009), Dave Eggers chronicles the Zeitoun family’s experiences of Hurricane Katrina. Eggers represents the father, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, as an ideal American in order to condemn post-9/11 Islamophobia and the US government’s militarization and ineptitude that results in his detention. After the book’s publication, Zeitoun is charged with domestic violence, and his story readily converts into the familiar narrative that uses patriotism and the protection of (white) women to justify US imperialism. I analyze how Eggers’s criticism is undercut by Zeitoun’s reliance on the marriage plot, America’s self-made man narrative, its narrative of conquest/discovery, and the American immigrant success story. These exemplify what I call “narrative humanity,” by which I mean the dominant generic and narrative conventions and codes that create and cover over exclusionary understandings of the human. Via analysis of Zeitoun, then, I argue for the need to tell alternative narratives about becoming human in post-9/11 America, the need to create genres wherein “upward mobility,” multicultural national belonging, and masculine individualism are neither markers of humanity nor a cover story for imperial violence, lost lives and livelihood, and gendered processes of dehumanization that define narrative humanity and the ongoing history of the United States.

In the wake of 9/11, the rise of American speculative fiction about American economic collapse, the future of an increasingly mobilized—via terrorism or political Islam—Muslim world, and Islam as a religion are hints that Americans are increasingly concerned about what Islam will have to offer in the near future. If Islam is a problem, these novels ask, how can it be fixed? The solution, from this view, is to make the Muslim world “like us”—secular and democratic, rather than allowing these cultures to achieve modernity on their own terms through democracy or otherwise. 9/11 and the Arab Spring seem to have woken the American public to the effect of the Muslim world on America and its “ideals,” but unfortunately these broader effects are seen—at least in speculative fiction—solely through the lens of 9/11 and the Arab Spring themselves. Such events have perhaps made the American perception of such American-Muslim relations personal via a fear of invasion or of democracy gone awry abroad.

(The New York Review of Science Fiction; Sept. 2012 Issue, Vol. 25, No. 289, p.8-11)

On September 11, 2001, human bodies fell from some of the tallest buildings in the world and shattered on the pavement below. People jumped from the windows of the World Trade Center to escape fire, and this fire was sustained by the artefacts of early 21st-century technological progress: jet fuel, paper, people, and photocopiers. 9/11 was a symbolic act engaged with politics and aesthetics, but which also placed the base suffering of the human body and mind at its heart. The horror of the terrorist attacks was broadcast on television, another piece of technology deeply woven into Western consciousness. Footage of 9/11 played over and over again on multiple screens, and this footage is now easily accessible on the internet. 9/11’s images are repeated like the pop art of Andy Warhol, whose work Hal Foster describes as ‘a warding away of traumatic significance and an opening out to it’ (1996: 132). This is what occurred during 9/11, and it is what makes it an example of the sublime. Responses to 9/11 attempt to escape its traumatic consequences; but, to do so, one must accept the bodily experience of trauma. In the pages that follow, I will argue that post-9/11 intellectual discourse is informed by the “games” of ludic postmodernism, but in the non-ludic languages of trauma, the uncanny, and the sublime. Trauma theory bases itself in the human body, and I will be exploring how the sublime and the uncanny are understood as embodied in 9/11.

This article reads Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland as novels similarly preoccupied with the surreptitious linkages between risk, financial speculation, and terror. In doing so, it argues that Hamid and O'Neill mark a shift away from the post-9/11 novel's prevailing investment in traumatic domesticity in order to develop nuanced treatments of how, in the wake of 9/11, risk, speculation, and terror are intensified along racial lines, and unevenly distributed across geopolitical divides between the Global North and South. In this way, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland reveal the superficial nature of risk society's ideal subject. Beyond this, however, these novels also demonstrate risk society's continued production of speculative or dissembling narratives designed to shield precarious subjects against future risks, while also projecting risky affective and political reinvestments in national contexts presumably consigned to vestigial status in an otherwise global imaginary.

The following study draws on the textual analysis of Fatima Bhutto’s novel ‘The Shadow of The Crescent Moon’ with new historicist perspective. Michael Foucault’s model of Subject and Power as mentioned in his one of the authored essays ‘why study power? The Question of the Subject, is used as a framework for the study. The purpose of the study is to highlight realistic picture of Pakistani Society with reference to Bhutto’s personal life instances. This study will also focus on the author’s attempt of dismantling stereotypes associated to Pakistani women specifically and the country generally. As a post colonial writing the writer has highlighted the aftermaths of colonization which people of Tribal areas are still confronting. She has highlighted the traumatic experiences of war, bloodshed and betrayal which people have encountered specifically in post 9/11 scenario. Bhutto’s characters, in all such difficult situations have exerted their power and maintained their individuality. By the end of the novel Bhutto has concluded them as independent, accomplished and sovereign beings. Through vivid and graphic descriptions realistic Pakistani society has also been portrayed which finally fulfills the purpose of post colonial writing. Post colonial writers employ fiction as way of rewriting their history and elevating the stance of indigenous people and Bhutto has accomplished in doing so. In current scenario where every Muslim in west is suspected as terrorist, such novels help in dismantling the stereotypes attached to Muslims.

During Cold War era, the US supported the armed groups in Afghanistan in terms of training and ammunition against the Soviet Union by fuelling Islamic jihadism. After failed invasion of Soviet Union, the US withdrew completely leaving the armed groups from the region and it created a threat to the whole world. The US became one of the biggest targets and victims of its own policy with 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan was one of the countries the US occupied in order to fight against terrorist organizations and to bring democracy to countries that feed and support terrorism within the framework of the Bush Doctrine. The US did not carry out this invasion alone and for the first time in its history, NATO took action within the scope of Article 5 and engaged in a collective intervention. The point reached at the end of the 20-year invasion, where humanitarian loss and economic costs are too heavy to be overcome, the US, who sat at the table with the Taliban, quickly retreated from the region by leaving everything else-once again-just as how it was while disappointing its NATO allies.

Scholars have questioned what Nat Turner meant to others in the past; in this article, I question what he means today. Reversing William Andrews's injunction to read “Prophet Nat's” 1831 insurrection through the US's encounter with religio-political terrorism on 9/11, I instead examine the effect September 11th has had on the rebel slave's contemporary afterlife. Ultimately this article asks what cultural work Nat Turner now performs, what his recent depictions tell us about the racial formations of the present. Drawing on comics theory, I parse the visual rhetoric of Kyle Baker's popular and increasingly studied comic Nat Turner, in which Baker tropes Nat Turner as Christ just as Nat Turner himself did in his Confessions. Baker produces an iconic black hero, one who is visually antithetical to racist images of “the terrorist” circulating in post-9/11 discourses. By doing so, Baker safeguards not only Nat Turner but US “blackness” from Islamophobia during the age of the global War on Terror. Finally, by reading Baker's comic alongside other recent, unexamined depictions of the rebel slave, this article updates the archive on Nat Turner and complicates the political possibilities that inhere in other sites of cultural memory.

Después de los atentados del 11 de septiembre fue común la teoría que sostenía que el ataque había sido en realidad un auto-atentado. En este libro se exploran la bases históricas, políticas y sociológicas sobre las que se construye esa hipótesis.

This paper reads Joshua Ferris's best-selling 2007 novel Then We Came to the End as an unconventional entry into the canon of 9/11 fiction. The novel, best-known for its extended use of the first-person plural "we" narrator, deploys a number of plot echoes and strategic elisions to draw attention to events that are-nevertheless-left unstated. Drawing on narratology and Freud's sense of the uncanny (particularly critic Mark Fisher's supplemental ideas of the "weird" and "eerie"), this paper connects the use of "we" and narrative absences to larger cultural anxieties around the events of 9/11, ultimately arguing that the novel's attempt to avoid "re-enacting the 'terrorism of spectacle'" (Däwes 3) by foregrounding representational challenges runs into an alternate problem: turning readers away from the genuine historical complexities of those events. The paper closes with a discussion of how other 9/11 novels have navigated this same double-bind.

Set in the early 2010s, the backdrop of Kamila Shamsie's novel Home Fire (2017) is a familiar one to contemporary readers, colored by the rise of far-right populist movements and the increase in anti-Muslim initiatives. This article examines how the novel engages with new Orientalist representations post-9/11 on two levels. Firstly, Shamsie's novel is shaped by the political narratives of the War on Terror and, in turn, responds to the upshot of these new configurations of power, reflecting how the difficulty of making sense of 9/11 exacerbated the Orientalist binary of East and West. Secondly, the novel reflects on the unenviable choice, for female kin to male terrorists, of either being Orientalized or re-orientalizing, a form of self-perpetrated Othering. This study is framed by re-orientalism theory in its analysis of how the East continues to engage the West in increasingly self-aware, multi-layered ways, constantly renegotiating positions of power and influence.

Stressing that the pronoun "I" picks out one and only one person in the world (i.e., me), I argue against Hunt (and other like-minded Rand commentators) that the supposed "hard case" of destructive people who do not care for their own lives poses no special difficulty for rational egoism. I conclude that the proper response to a terse objection like "What about suicide bombers?" is the equally terse assertion "But I don't want to get blown up."

The acclaim Cantet received obscures the way "The Class" reinforces the very undercurrents in French culture he sets out to critique. Rather than unearthing or mirroring the racial dynamics of twenty-first-century Paris, Cantet brings to the film a set of fascinations and anxieties latent in the French imagination about blackness, Islam and Arab culture. His preoccupations and preconceptions with race, religion and nationality appear first in the portrayal of Muslim immigrants as threatening; next, in his image of a ‘white saviour’ bent on rescuing racial minorities; and last, through a narrative that symbolically banishes its Muslim characters. These elements make 'The Class' not just a postcolonial text, reflecting France’s long history with its African and Muslim subjects, but one that sheds light on the embattled landscape of twenty-first century France, and the West more broadly, in the long wake of September 11, 2001.

Imagining Afghanistan examines how Afghanistan has been imagined in literary and visual texts that were published after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion—the era that propelled Afghanistan into the center of global media visibility. Through an analysis of fiction, graphic novels, memoirs, drama, and film, the book demonstrates that writing and screening “Afghanistan” has become a conduit for understanding our shared post-9/11 condition. “Afghanistan” serves as a lens through which contemporary cultural producers contend with the moral ambiguities of 21st century humanitarianism, interpret the legacy of the Cold War, debate the role of the U.S. in the rise of transnational terror, and grapple with the long-term impact of war on both human and nonhuman ecologies.

The book argues that post-9/11 global Afghanistan literary production remains largely NATO-centric insofar as it is marked by an uncritical investment in humanitarianism as an approach to Third World suffering and in anti-communism as an unquestioned premise. The book’s first half exposes how persisting anti-socialist biases (including anti-statist bias) not only shaped recent literary and visual texts on Afghanistan (resulting in a distorted portrayal of its tragic history) but also informed these texts’ reception by critics. In the book’s second half, the author examines cultural texts that challenge this limited horizon, and in doing so, forge alternative ways of representing traumatic histories. Captured by the author through the concepts of deep time, nonhuman witness, and war as a multispecies ecology, these new aesthetics bring us a sophisticated portrait of Afghanistan as a rich multispecies habitat affected in dramatic ways by decades of war but not annihilated.

This work is a critical exploration of a book by Sam Harris entitled 'The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason'. While the book by Mr. Harris puts forth arguments that attempt to paint all spirituality and religion with broad strokes of derision, castigation, and rejection, Mr. Harris also reserves a great deal of space within his book for casting aspersions on Islam and Muslims. The present critical review examines the many errors, misunderstandings, and problems contained in the aforementioned work of Mr. Harris. This book -- minus corrections, new formatting, and name changes -- was previously published as:  'Sam Harris and the End of Faith: A Muslim's Critical Response'.

In my thesis on ‘Hybrid-Muslim Identity and Islamophobia in Post-9/11 U.S. American Literature’, I examine the novels 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid and 'Native Believer' by Ali Eteraz. These two novels portray two protagonists, who are either first or second-generation Muslim migrants in the USA and are both of Pakistani heritage. In both of the novels 9/11 plays a significant role, since this historical event marks a turning point in the lives of many Muslims in the USA and worldwide. This event has changed the way Muslims are perceived, treated and have continued to live their lives. The novels I chose for my thesis portray two individual Muslim experiences, in which the protagonists are affected by the fact that they are Muslims living in post-9/11 America. But, what distinguishes them both is the way they are dealing with the given situation.

Although Don Delillo’s Falling Man (2007) has been one of the most influential 9/11 novels written to this day, it did not meet the expectations of reviewers when it was published. It is necessary to bear in mind that 9/11 can be understood both as a psychic/personal trauma and a cultural/collective one since it was a wound not only in the mind of those directly affected by the tragedy but also in the nation’s sense of identity. Despite DeLillo’s previous interest in cultural issues, he chose to write a 9/11 psychic —rather than cultural— trauma novel. Th is paper analyses the literary techniques and means of representation used in the novel to reflect the effects of traumatic memory and ponders the advantages and shortcomings of psychic trauma novels in the representation of traumas that affect society at large.

KEYWORDS: trauma studies; Falling Man; Don DeLillo; trauma fiction; 9/11 fiction; contemporary American literature

The current paper aims at presenting a close reading of the protagonist’s reminiscences in Mohsen Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist in terms of an eclectic approach toward representation of trauma. Freud and Breuer’s theory of psychological trauma, Judith Herman’s concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and Jeffery Alexander’s notion of cultural trauma are employed as the conceptual framework of this analysis. Psychological trauma refers to the unbearable, untreatable, and unspeakable psychological wounds remaining on the subject’s unconsciousness. PTSD concentrates on troublesomeness in regular physical activities including rapid distraction, insomnia, and shifting in and out through past memories, triggered by trauma. Cultural trauma traces the changes at the level of collective identity of a group due to a formerly experienced horrendous event. The Adventures of Changez, the novel’s narrator, dating back to around the 9/11 attack are represented in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The paper conducted a survey through theories of trauma depicting memory as a venue where the subject’s psychical status could be fully scrutinized. The results of the study demonstrated that a traumatic event such as that of the 9/11 has a long-term devastating impact on Changez’s subjectivity as well as a collective negative consequence for Pakistan’s new generation of intellectual immigrants.

Drawings, paintings, photographs, moving images and the emergence of Visual Culture as a discipline can confirm the growing centrality of the visuality in our everyday life. This visuality shapes people's attitude and understanding and once constantly reproduced, constructs a fixed set of meaning for certain issues, perspectives, cultures, and groups of people. Therein lies the danger when visuality commits the misrepresentation, which is part of the process of 'Othering' and the backbone of visual imperialism. The Western representation of the East and its women has been one of these misrepresentations through which East is conceived as exotic, erotic, inferior and slave. By drawing upon Hall's definition of representation (1997), this paper explores the historical representation of Eastern women through the Oriental harem paintings and photography, and reveals how the misconception of the harem Odalisques was conceived. It examines how this stereotypical representation resurfaced in the post-9/11 contexts through life narratives written by Muslim women known as the new Scheherazade. Unlike the Scheherazade of the Oriental harem who was reduced to a submissive sexy odalisque, these Scheherazade are brave and articulate. I argue that this is a post-9/11 strategy to offset all the negative depictions of Muslim women. These brave Scheherazades have been provided with the platform to relate the plights of living in Islamic societies as a woman, and therefore their texts are, in Whitlock's term (2007), 'soft weapons' in manufacturing consent for the presence of empire in the East by corroborating the Orientalist representation of Muslim women.

This article seeks to explore into the impact of 9/11 tragedy on the private lives of ordinary people and individuals and into the associated theme of identity crisis, as reflected in four important post-9/11 poems – “Someone Says They Looked Like Cartwheeling Birds” by Lyn Lifshin, “Making Love After September 11, 2001” by Aliki Barnstone, “Surviving” by Pat West and “October” by Louise Gluck.  As such an impact and identity crisis are inseparably related to trauma, it is quite legitimate to examine this issue in reference to trauma theory and, especially, the concept of “belatedness”, although the first two poems are not clearly connected to this theory. My article, ultimately, attempts to demonstrate the points that identity crisis in the last two poems, basically, results from a subtle tension between the present and the past selves of the speakers, who seek to move beyond trauma, and that all these four poems make an intense appeal to us by creating something eternal out of shocking human loss and sufferings.
                 
Keywords: identity crisis, trauma theory, belatedness, psychological tension.

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist and consultant. His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was widely acclaimed. This Paper discusses the issue of hybridity and identity struggle as experienced by the main character of the novel, Changez. He is a Pakistani who graduates from Princeton University and joins a high-end valuation firm in America. This paper examines the issue from a postcolonial perspective. Changez struggles to remain in-between, but his personal, social and political experiences lead him to take a difficult yet expected decision.

Reimagining Genre looks closely at authors who actively write away from (rather than into) contemporary America as a way to build individual identity. Paradoxically, these authors do so by revisiting and revising a canonical American genre: the ethnic bildungsroman, and by leveraging their contemporary voices to repurpose established novels to weave revised narratives.

As authors, Moshin Hamid and H.M. Naqvi both nod to Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Home Boy (2009), respectively, leaning on the ethnic bildungsroman tradition in order to narrate stories of contemporary ethnic identity formation in America. Indeed, by putting the cultural pluralism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century momentarily in abeyance, these novelists look backward to earlier novel forms in order to focus more closely on ideological dynamics in contemporary America, and specifically how a previously absorbed category (ethnicity) is in fact central to the experience of contemporary American immigrant identity formation.

Counter-intuitively, by using the classic tropes and forms, Hamid and Naqvi construct literary outcomes that operate as declarations of new identity options rather than those traditionally bound by American norms. They do not blindly accept America, choosing instead to pursue new options. One such option is the ability of middle- and upper-class immigrants to leave rather than integrate into America. In other words, Naqvi and Hamid utilize a traditional genre to update immigrant narratives, commenting on the possibility of completely undoing national allegiances, “facile” and otherwise, in the face of contemporary American politics.

Of all American metropolises, New York has become one of the most interesting and representative cities for writers, some of whom, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, have tried to reflect in their fiction the consequences of this traumatic event. In this essay I want to deal with one of these novels, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), which uses the image of a “broken” New York after the attacks as a metaphor for a society that, for a while, had its social rules and organization deeply altered. McInerney’s fiction is inextricably linked to New York since his main novels, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), whose first edition cover had featured the Twin Towers, Story of My Life (1988), Brightness Falls (1992), Model Behaviour (1998) and, of course, The Good Life (2006), are all set in New York and deal with Manhattan’s narcissistic and shallow upper classes. The author’s interest in superficiality, money, sex and drugs aroused the suspicion of some literary critics, who believed the 9/11 subject was too serious to be handled by a social satirist like McInerney, who has often been accused of sharing the values of the same wealthy and shallow New York socialites he vividly portrays. However, McInerney seems to have changed his style and has constructed a touching story in which the physical disintegration of the city causes the temporal disintegration of the glitterati’s narcissistic values. In this essay I will analyse to what extent McInerney’s eye for social satire, together with his portrayal of Manhattan as a theatre of social action, brings forth one of the most vivid representations of the effects of terrorism in New York.

Of all American metropolises, New York has become one of the most interesting and representative cities for writers, some of whom, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, have tried to reflect in their fiction the consequences of this traumatic event. In this essay I want to deal with one of these novels, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), which uses the image of a “broken” New York after the attacks as a metaphor for a society that, for a while, had its social rules and organization deeply altered. McInerney’s fiction is inextricably linked to New York since his main novels, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), whose first edition cover had featured the Twin Towers, Story of My Life (1988), Brightness Falls (1992), Model Behaviour (1998) and, of course, The Good Life (2006), are all set in New York and deal with Manhattan’s narcissistic and shallow upper classes. The author’s interest in superficiality, money, sex and drugs aroused the suspicion of some literary critics, who believed the 9/11 subject was too serious to be handled by a social satirist like McInerney, who has often been accused of sharing the values of the same wealthy and shallow New York socialites he vividly portrays. However, McInerney seems to have changed his style and has constructed a touching story in which the physical disintegration of the city causes the temporal disintegration of the glitterati’s narcissistic values. In this essay I will analyse to what extent McInerney’s eye for social satire, together with his portrayal of Manhattan as a theatre of social action, brings forth one of the most vivid representations of the effects of terrorism in New York.

Contemporary approaches to integrating "self" and the "other"—such as multiculturalism, cultural diversity, race relations, inclusiveness strategies, or identity politics—are flawed from the perspective of traditional thought. At their core, modernist ideologies are inimical to and destructive of all human diversity. The new face of antipathy to pluralism is becoming more deceptive as it grows less focused on respecting diversity and more on promoting ideological uniformity and the erection of a global monoculture. This essay argues that it is from a metaphysical perspective that human diversity can be fully understood and can seek to reconcile the dichotomy of "self" and the "other".

Do you know who Special Master Ken Feinberg is and what part in the settlements Fix The Fund led by Charles Wolf played in Compensating loved ones of those who died or were injured on 9-11? Today we remember the devastating morning that would come to be known forever as 9-11. September 11, 2001 the day that changed America forever. Do you know that from the ashes of the Towers there was born a 9-11 Victims Compensation Fund, the first of its kind and the only one of its kind still to this day? I believe this story is one that should give birth to a new (VCF), a Fund for those who have also lost loved ones, their properties, health and wealth at the hands of the very same criminals involved in the 9-11 nightmare. A fund called "The Financial Crimes Victim Compensation Fund", with a Special Master who mirrors Ken Feinberg's walk from the duty of Special Master for the VCF into what he found to be an astonishing self realization and new beginning as a victims real friend. We need a Special Master for Americans at large.