Overview

A study of the confluences between liberal white Americans’ trauma, their reverting to hyper-conservative Islamophobia, and Don DeLillo’s call to American authors that they compose a new so-called ‘Great American Novel’ pluriverse in the wake of 9/11. In December 2001, Don DeLillo urged American writers to create “the counternarrative” that would reclaim control of culture in a call for nation-rebuilding fiction that mirrors John William de Forest’s original post-Civil War coinage of the term and concept of the “Great American Novel.” Through this conceptual framework, Sheheryar Sheikh examines four major post-9/11 works to demonstrate a concerted effort by these authors to address the “Muslim Question” in novels that feature and critique traumatized white Americans creating mechanisms with which to mitigate the trauma of 9/11 as it resurges at even the thought of Muslims existing in America after 9/11. By looking at repression, appropriation, adversarial othering, and enforced secularization as they appear in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, John Updike’s Terrorist, DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Amy Waldman’s The Submission, this study shows the iterations of “solutions” and the abandonment of these ideals by traumatized white liberals. While the original concept of the Great American Novel featured fluid and multifaceted explorations of the American Dream, The Post-9/11 Great American Novel shows how this renewed interest in creating nation-rebuilding texts threatened to stagnate and calcify this literary form. Specifically, because these texts primarily congeal around the occlusion of Muslims and Islam within and from the United States.

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Reviews

This is a politically valuable account of how many post-9/11 American novels have contributed to prejudices towards Islam. An urgent and highly informed study of unconscious collusions with pervasive discourses. * Martin Randall, Senior Lecturer in Creative Arts, University of Gloucestershire, UK * This is an outstanding and welcome re-evaluation of the early ‘9/11 novel’. Reading a set of key texts within the history and critical paradigm of the ‘great American novel’, Sheheryar B. Sheikh takes great care in illuminating the wider permutations of their ideological currents. Ultimately, The Post-9/11 Great American Novel, offers in-depth textual analysis and compelling new readings of these novels, as well as a range of insights into the mechanics of Islamophobia in the early 21st century. * Arin Keeble, Lecturer in English, Edinburgh Napier University, UK * Sheheryar B. Sheikh’s very persuasive work offers fresh observations on ‘canonized’ 9/11 novels and illustrates how this literary research continues to be a relevant discipline even a quarter of century later. This book provides urgently needed criticism on the us/them and good/evil binaries of post-9/11 discourse that still pervade our current times. * Sini Eikonsalo, Assistant Professor in English Literature, Metropolitan University Prague, Czechia, and author of ""When everything is about 9/11: On reading contemporary fiction through 9/11 and the boundaries of the 9/11 novel"" *

Author Information

Sheheryar B. Sheikh is Donald Hill Family Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University, Canada, where he teaches creative writing. He has published two novels with HarperCollins India, The Still Point of the Turning World (2017) and Call Me Al: The Hero’s Ha-Ha Journey (2019), both of which have been finalists for the All-Pakistan Getz Pharma prize.

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