Introduction: 9/11 as Catalyst – American and British Cultural Responses

Abstract

More than eight years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, literary and cultural studies criticism on “9/11” has predominantly come to the conclusion that the events have not brought about the historical, political, and cultural caesura that many commentators had predicted in the immediate aftermath – and that the Bush administration relied on in its introduction of various domestic and foreign policy measures in response to the perceived national and international security crisis. As David Holloway argues in his ideological history of the representation of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ in the years 2001 to 2006, the notion that 9/11 was a moment of historical rupture is not tenable: Contemporary discussions about the causes and outcomes of 9/11 […] were usually couched in explanatory frameworks, terminologies and styles, which had deep roots in American and Western cultural and intellectual history. At times there was an undeniably strong revisionist current in contemporary thought and culture. Yet wherever one looked in the post-9/11 era what was most striking was the absence of clean breaks. (Holloway 2008, 4) However, what the events of 9/11 did bring about was a catalytic effect, especially in the fields of politics and culture. Holloway’s survey of responses to 9/11 in the political arena, in the mass media, in cinema, literature, photography, and the visual arts is only one illustration of the fact that 9/11 accelerated and reinvigorated discussions and debates that had for quite some time been public issues. In the realm of (inter)national politics, the problem of how to respond to al-Qaida terrorism and transnational Islamist insurgency, for instance, had been a pressing issue all through the 1990s and now gained renewed urgency; in the realm of literature and culture, the debate about the “end of irony” and postmodernism – already losing some momentum at the turn of the millennium – was strongly reenergized in the context of loudly voiced demands to tell the 9/11 experience ‘as it really was.’ Ultimately, in the U.S. as well as in Britain, the catalytic effect of 9/11 has by now produced a large corpus of textual/cultural representations that allow us to identify a variety of aesthetic and thematic responses. In various media and in various genres the challenge to represent and thereby make sense of and contribute to the political and cultural discourses on 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ has been met and