Literature After 9/11

Fourteen papers presented by Kenniston (U. of Nevada) and Quinn (Harvard U.) conduct readings of direct and indirect representations of the September 11th attacks in literature. The papers are organized into three sections that respectively explore 9/11 literature's disruptions of conventional ways of marking witness and memory as well as connections drawn between 9/11 and other events; connections between the public and the private as revealed by mapping the relationships between witness, feeling, and interpretation of 9/11; and what representations of 9/11 within lyric poetry, realistic novels, and drama reveal about reception, audience, and the role of literature itself. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Ann Keniston is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada-Reno, and is the author of Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry (Routledge 2006), and a poetry collection, The Caution of Human Gestures (David Robert, 2005).

Jeanne Follansbee Quinn is director of studies for the Program in History and Literature at Harvard University and has published essays on James Agee and Walker Evans, Richard Wright and American pragmatism. She is completing a book on anti-fascist aesthetics in the United States during the 1930s, Democratic Aesthetics: Popular Front Anti-Fascism.