Daniel Lea, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Anglo-American Writers’ Responses to September 11. Symbiosis, 11.2 (October 2007) 3-26.

This essay was originally published in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Volume 11.2 (October 2007) pp. 3-26

Essay Topics and Keywords:

Al Qaeda, World Trade Center, 11 September 2001, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, Ian McEwan, Paul Auster, Jean Baudrillard in The Spirit of Terrorism (2002) and Slavoj Žižek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002)

An extract from this essay:

“If, as the previous section has shown, both American and British writers responded to the drama of September 11 as a crisis or collision of narratives, then that was partly due to the spectacularly filmic quality of the unfolding events. An operation planned with ‘a pause of 15 minutes, to give the world time to gather round its TV sets’ was, for Martin Amis, ‘the apotheosis of the postmodern era—the era of images and perceptions’ (Amis 2001), and this self-consciously visual aspect to the attack was something that was picked up over and over by the first novelist respondees.”

Daniel Lea

Affiliation: Oxford Brookes University