Paradoxes and substitutions: charting patterns in the American novels of 9/11

This thesis argues that the novels of 9/11 form a distinct genre within contemporary American fiction that poses a challenge to the dominant tenets of postmodernism. Ranging across diverse forms, narratives, registers and readership, the thesis claims the fiction of 9/11 is defined by a shared mediation of the cultural and aesthetic representational dilemmas associated with loss in the aftermath.This thesis identifies the recurrent patterns and shared figurations by which these novels portray and re-imagine the event and memory of 9/11 to argue that its representation is always paradoxical. Specifically, the thesis interrogates various literary techniques that oscillate between the three main paradoxes of absence and presence, speech and silence and specificity and universality in its mediation of 9/11.Central to this literature, and hence its analysis, is the problematic and trauma of loss. The thesis turns to this vital concern with the lens of psychoanalysis. It will consider the ways that many of the fictional strategies for dealing with loss that recur across the novels centre upon the tropes of substitution, repetition and compulsion, and the ways these types of operations play out across the areas of the body, the city and time.These related sites of trauma organise the thesis and the first chapter argues that the novels attempt to offer substitutes for the lost body of 9/11 because a surrogate body is needed before even the simplest articulation is possible. Having established that the body authorises speech, the focus of the second and third chapters will be the co-ordinates of orientation: space and time, respectively. The second chapter proposes that a range of post-9/11 fictional cities have affected the ways in which urban spaces are conceptualised in the novels, both in terms of structure and figuration. The third chapter moves into an analysis of the way the event of 9/11 prompts complicated temporal manipulations and disjunctions within the novels, which speak to a wish to reverse the manifold absences of 9/11. In its consideration of ten literary texts, this thesis argues that the novels of 9/11 demonstrate the imperatives to relive, revisit and reconceptualise the event, and seek to reconstitute the myriad losses sustained