Senior Honours Seminar – Theory
Term 1
M, 100:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
This seminar will explore the literary impact of 9/11 through poetry, fiction and the essay. Trauma will be a major concern, the argument of the seminar that 9/11 generated, almost forced, new approaches to narrative and genre at the same time it drove a re-assessment of the function and purpose of contemporary American writing. The course will challenge the view of Frédéric Beigbeder that “since September 11, 2001, reality has not only outstripped fiction, it’s destroying it.” Literature and affect, writing and disaster, words and catastrophe are some of the topics to be addressed in texts by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Moshin Hamid, Robert Creely, Art Spiegelman, Galway Kinnel, Judith Butler and David Foster Wallace.
