ABSTRACT
More than five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is not yet clear what “literature after 9/11” will be. The question of whether September 11 represents a cultural rupture remains open. Indeed, there is much continuity to be found. While post-9/11 literary works replay many familiar themes and techniques of post-World War II American literature, numerous pre-9/11 works foreshadow contemporary concerns, sometimes in quite uncanny ways. Thus, I begin this chapter on literature after 9/11 with a pre-9/11 work that quite self-consciously addresses many of the questions that haunt writers working in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991), a novel written in proximity to the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, suggests a critical framework that can help illuminate the political stakes of aesthetic acts in the wake of 9/11.
