ABSTRACT
The post-9/11 novel reflects the shift from bilateral nation-state politics to the multilateralism of transnational politics. While much of the criticism regarding novels of 9/11 tends to approach these works through theories of collective trauma, I argue for the evolution of a post-9/11 novel that pursues a transversal approach to global conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests. The post-9/11 novel figures its narratological crises in terms of transnational issues—most prominently globalization and terrorism but also human rights, the rights of women and ethnic minorities, migration, and freedom of expression. While these novels are descendants of political novels of the nineteenth century that treated imperialism and the challenge presented by “world anarchism,” the post-9/11 novel emerges in resistance to the global hegemony of the market state and its viral counterapparatus of asymmetrical terrorism. These are not novels about terror(ism), nor are they domesticated representations of catastrophe; rather, they are instances of the novel in terror, which recognizes that everything having been changed after 9/11, only the formally inventive presentation will suffice to acknowledge the event’s unpresentability and its shock to the political order.
