Terrorism in 1990s novels by Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Bret Easton Ellis serves as a key trope to interrogate the limits of writing and the power of literature. Based on the thought of Maurice Blanchot, this study explores the writer's terrorist temptation, literature's negotiation of radical alterity, and novelistic elucidations of terrorism.
‘Knowledge Landscapes North America’ intervenes in current critical debates on concepts of knowledge and modes of knowledge production and circulation. As knowledge has been proclaimed an indispensable economic resource, scholarly and public discourses increasingly interrogate its established and newly evolving forms and institutions. These discussions frequently focus on North America and its knowledge landscapes, which retain their crucial position in knowledge distribution despite shifts in global power constellations. The contributions to this volume explore the particularities of these knowledge formations by raising pertinent questions: How do North American knowledge institutions drive global knowledge economies—and in which ways are they driven by them? Which agents shape North American knowledge landscapes? What conditions have been conducive to the emergence of innovative knowledges? The authors interrogate the significance of local and tacit knowledge; they reflect on marginalized or ‘forgotten’ knowledges as well as on the expertise of literature and the arts; and they map the shifting media ecologies that have affected concepts of knowledge and its circulation.
Rather than turning backward and remembering 9/11, this book sets out to reflect on how the events of September 11, 2001, have shifted our perspectives on a whole series of political, economic, social, and cultural processes. Beyond 9/11 raises the question how the intense debates on the 2001 terrorist attacks and their aftermaths have come to shape our present moment and frame what lies ahead. At the same time, this collection acknowledges that the label «9/11» has often bracketed cultural complexities we have only begun to understand. In Beyond 9/11 , contributors from the fields of American studies, political science, economics, history, theology, and the arts reappraise the cultural climate and the global impact of the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century.