Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Terror Of The Political: Community, Identity, And Apocalypse In Don Delillo's Falling Man, Dillon Rockrohr

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Falling Man by Don DeLillo casts the event of 9/11 and its aftermath in such a way that the novel itself enacts an aesthetic terror aimed at explicating the ubiquitous social-atmospheric elements of community- and identity-formation out of which terror precipitates. As DeLillo figures terrorism in the novel as apocalyptic in that it is a violence that reveals the violence constitutive of political community, including the political community of liberal democracy, which ostensibly relegates violence to domains not considered legitimately political. DeLillo’s novel, as an act of aesthetic terrorism, not only thematizes the instantiation of terror that precipitates out of …