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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey
“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey
Publications and Research
Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian couple who, as newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly "post-racial" culture converge in this new generation of immigrants' painful encounter with the American dream. I consider the ways Mbue's novel shares themes with a "second wave" of post- 9/11 literature—first, in centering the disillusionment of a protagonist aspiring to the American dream; next, in its representation of New York as a space haunted by 9/11, but also of resistance to the …
Border Insecurity: Reading Transnational Environments In Jim Lynch’S Border Songs, Jenny Kerber
Border Insecurity: Reading Transnational Environments In Jim Lynch’S Border Songs, Jenny Kerber
English and Film Studies Faculty Publications
This article applies an eco-critical approach to contemporary American fiction about the Canada-US border, examining Jim Lynch’s portrayal of the British Columbia-Washington borderlands in his 2009 novel Border Songs. It argues that studying transnational environmental actors in border texts—in this case, marijuana, human migrants, and migratory birds—helps illuminate the contingency of political boundaries, problems of scale, and discourses of risk and security in cross-border regions after 9/11. Further, it suggests that widening the analysis of trans-border activity to include environmental phenomena productively troubles concepts of nature and regional belonging in an era of climate change and economic globalization. Cet …
"Terror As Theater": Unraveling Spectacle In Post 9/11 Literatures, Elise Christine Silva
"Terror As Theater": Unraveling Spectacle In Post 9/11 Literatures, Elise Christine Silva
Faculty Publications
For the purposes of this paper, I will discuss two post 9/11 novels—both of which utilize the terror-as-theatre metaphor in order to work through the 9/11 spectacle. Both Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) explore avenues of communication and meaning making in the face of an event that many critics suggested defied language, description, and expression. Through their thematic use of performance, these texts reject a closed and inert polarized interpretation of 9/11 and invite a pastiche of interpretations and interactions. Through this communicative connection, authors, texts, and readers convene to …