Dr. Levin Arnsperger

Dissertation Abstract

In the Shadow of the Plot: Representations of Muslim Terrorists in 9/11 Literature

In my dissertation, I examine terrorist literature: contemporary American and British writings that incorporate representations of Muslim terrorists and that evoke the events of September 11, 2001. In these texts, the fictional Muslim terrorist arguably occupies a place of belonging and non-belonging, located outside and within Western society. In an attendant process, the terrorist is at once demonized and humanized, as the texts create a tense bond of hospitality/hostility in configuring the terrorist’s encounter with the West. Terrorist literature accesses the terrorist’s mindset, displaying his ordinariness, but it also perpetuates a rhetoric of difference and of a clash of cultures, pitting guest against host.

The selected primary texts include novels by Sherman Alexie, Andre Dubus, Don DeLillo, Jarett Kobek, and John Updike, short stories by Alexie and Martin Amis, and a play by Allan Havis – in addition to a poem by Tom Clark and a short story by Updike. Aside from studying intersections and differences between these texts as well as investigating strategies of explicating the violent act, I focus on renderings of the Muslim perpetrator’s consciousness, employing narratological theories by Alan Palmer and Dorrit Cohn. These reproductions of imaginary emotions and beliefs often impose on the characters the authors’ Orientalist perceptions of Islam.

Terrorism appears in the analyzed texts as based in part on the – actual and perceived – incompatibility of cultures. Besides identifying this relational facet of terrorism, most of terrorist literature associates violence with conflicts emerging within an Islamic sphere. The male Muslim perpetrators experience an internal struggle generated by a restrictive religious and socio-cultural environment. This struggle is expressed via the characters’ emotional or physical suffering, linked to their challenged sexuality and masculinity. To carve out the queering, feminizing, and othering of Muslim terrorists in contemporary literature, I place, for example, Michael Kimmel in conversation with Jasbir Puar.

The reader of terrorist literature is asked to draw a vector from individual beliefs and pathologies to a perpetrator’s actions. The violent act is usually prefigured as the culmination of the texts, and it is the task of the reader to trace the thread that binds together the protagonist’s experiences, emotions, and actions. An analysis of terrorist literature thus hinges on matters of hermeneutics and epistemology. The terrorists, some of them entirely fictitious, others fictionalized versions of actual hijacker-pilots, endeavor to understand their own tenuous place vis-à-vis the West and the terrorist plot. For readers, the apprehension of the fictional perpetrator’s movements and motivations – the reconstruction of his trajectory – encompasses the integration of contemporary discourses on Islam and terrorism with the narrative’s perspectives, but it also includes the braiding of specific plot elements with the terrorist act. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur, I demonstrate the retrospective and yet anticipatory process of sense-making or emplotment, a process that configures, from narration and dialogues, the imaginary Muslim terrorist’s path.