The city since 9/11 : literature, film, television

Charting the intersection of aesthetic representation and the material conditions of urban space, The City Since 9/11 posits that the contemporary metropolis provides a significant context for reassessing theoretical concerns related to narrative, identity, home, and personal precarity. In the years since the September 11 attacks, writers and filmmakers have explored urban spaces as contested sites—shaped by the prevailing discourses of neoliberalism, homeland security, and the war on terror, but also haunted by an absence in the landscape that registers loss and prefigures future menace. In works of literature, film, and television, the city emerges as a paradoxical space of permanence and vulnerability and a convergence point for anxieties about globalization, structural inequality, and apocalyptic violence. Building on previous scholarship addressing trauma and the spectacle of terror, the contributors also draw upon works of philosophy, urban studies, and postmodern geography to theorize how literary and visual representations expose the persistent conflicts that arise as cities rebuild in the shadow of past ruins. Their essays advance new lines of argument that clarify art’s role in contemporary debates about spatial practices, gentrification, cosmopolitanism, memory and history, nostalgia, the uncanny and the abject, postmodern virtuality, the politics of realism, and the economic and social life of cities. The book offers fresh readings of familiar post-9/11 novels, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , but it also considers works by Teju Cole, Joseph O’Neill, Silver Krieger, Colum McCann, Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon, Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, William Gibson, Amitav Ghosh, and Katherine Boo. In addition, The City Since 9/11 includes essays on the films Children of Men , Hugo , and the adaptation of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , chapters on the television series The Bridge , The Killing , and The Wire , and an analysis of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence and the 9/11 Memorial. Content: Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: The City since 9/11 Keith Wilhite I. Remapping the City: Gentrification, the Usable Past, and the Postmodern Metropolis 1. Navigating the Post-9/11 Metropolis: Reclaiming and Remapping Urban Space in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland Karolina Golimowska 2. Million Dollar Views: Cognitive Gentrification in Post-9/11 New York City Jason Buchanan 3. New York Unearthed: 9/11, Let the Great World Spin, and the Archaeology of Grief Caroline Chamberlin Hellman 4. Rhetoric and Aesthetics of the Ephemeral in Ronald Sukenick's Last Fall Salwa Karoui-Elounelli 5. The Reality of Fiction in a Virtually Postmodern Metropolis: Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City and Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge Justin St. Clair II. The Metropolis Unmoored: Uncanny Worlds and Global Cities 6. Zombies, the Uncanny, and the City: Colson Whitehead's Zone One Tim Gauthier 7. The Spectral City: Paul Auster's Man in the Dark and Other Imagined Cities Eduardo Barros-Grela 8. Global Homesickness in William Gibson's Blue Ant Trilogy Sean Scanlan 9. Before After: Amitav Ghosh's Pre-1856 Cosmopolis as Post-9/11 Lost Object Hilary Thompson 10. Shifting the City's Center within Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers Ghazala Hashmi III. Framing the City: Abjection, Realism, and the Restorative Power of Cinema 11. Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men: Piling Up Traumatic Spectacles of Terror in a Post-9/11 World Jenny Kijowski 12. Abject Spaces in The Bridge and The Killing: The Post-9/11 City of Nordic Noir Fran Pheasant-Kelly 13. Gritty Urban Realism as Ideology: The Wire and the Televisual Representation of the "Inner City" Steve Macek 14. Early Cinema and the Post-9/11 City: Hugo and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Michael Devine Conclusion: Ruins and Memorials Catalina Florina Florescu Index About the Contributors "This work discusses the way in which action movies have responded to the visual and narrative challenge of depicting terrorist violence after 9/11, when the spectacular representation of terrorist violence - and by extension the consumers of these imagers - was considered as complicit behaviour. If terrorism is theatre, who goes to see the show? A close-reading of exemplary movies (V for Vendetta, Munich, and Children of Men) concentrates on three key aspects: How is terrorist violence justified, especially in comparison to other forms of violence? How is the audience implicitly positioned? And finally, what is the role and scope of the films' visual short-cuts, iconic "real" images such as those from the Abu Ghraib prison? The results reaffirm popular movies' power of working through traumatic events as well as their capacity to articulate a valid political critique. Instead of inventing or preceding real acts of violence, cinema can document, witness, and encourage the spectator to explore unorthodox viewing positions and moral dilemma. This interdisciplinary work is addressed to students of Philosophy, the Humanities, Cinema, American, or Cultural Studies as well as to the interested public." -- Library of Congress This book analyzes post-9/11 literature, film, and television through an interdisciplinary lens, taking into account contemporary debates about spatial practices, gentrification, cosmopolitanism, memory and history, nostalgia, the uncanny and the abject, postmodern virtuality, the politics of realism, and the economic and social life of cities. Featuring an international group of scholars, the volume theorizes how literary and visual representations expose the persistent conflicts that arise as cities rebuild in the shadow of past ruins