When the Centre Fell Apart: The Treatment of September 11 in Selected Anglophone Narratives

9/11 has found its way into fictional literature. This study analyses the treatment of 9/11 in Anglophone narratives differentiating between two perspectives: narratives dealing with the attacks from the victims’ perspective and narratives from the terrorists’ point of view offering new attempts at understanding. The underlying hypothesis is that decline is the central element in all the narratives discussed both on the story and discourse level. The victim narratives are provided by works by Jonathan Safran Foer, Nick McDonell, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ian McEwan, Frédéric Beigbeder and Art Spiegelman. Works by Martin Amis, John Updike, Mohsin Hamid and Pat Forde are analysed as terrorist narratives. Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man serves as a bridge between both perspectives.

Jessica Zeltner, born in 1984, studied English Literature, Political Science and Social Science at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She works as an editor’s assistant at a publishing house in Frankfurt/Main.