Points of Entry into 9/11 Texts
Contributors to the fall 2008 issue of American Literary History suggested competing models of post-9/11 literary motion: is its force field “centripetal” (external “worlds” tending to nuclear America) or “centrifugal” (American texts “deterritorialize,” speeding outward)? Is the “hemisphere” in hemispheric studies an invitation to heteroglossic openness and relish, or is it a conservative appeal for ownership and privacy? Are authors flattening literary topography by aligning the “American” local with “alien” reliefs, or counter-charging the publishing soil to amplify secular/fundamentalist, terrorist/humanist, East/West apartness? Are some texts embedded in prior analogues and better read as foreseen expressions of (post)colonial/postholocaust genes? We welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines.