Literatură, politică și mass-media. Reprezentări anglo-americane ale atentatelor de la 11 septembrie 2001

Abstract

Fifteen years ago, in the afternoon of September 11, 2001, the Romanian televisions, as many others on the face of the Earth, announced that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. It seemed like a scene from an apocalyptic thriller at first, before the sudden realisation that the yellow band with the words BREAKING NEWS on it was suggesting – no, was shouting out loud – that everything was REAL. The image of the two towers going down in flames haunted me for a long time, then were buried somewhere, in a corner of the unconscious, surfacing at the yearly anniversaries of the event and, rather randomly, ten years later, during an academic lecture on postmodern literature, when a novel ‘about 9/11’ was mentioned in passing. So, they are writing fiction about that now? They are, in dozens, hundreds even, as the preliminary research proved (approximately 250, two thirds of which are written by American authors, according to Dawes 2011 (qtd. in Gauthier 2015: 19). The same research brought forth the idea that the events of 9/11 had left many people with the impression that they were watching a film which surpassed the imagination of any ambitious Hollywood scriptwriter. Resonant names, of philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jürgen Habermas, or of novelists like Don DeLillo or Ian McEwan, described the events starting from their unreality, from their eerie resemblance to a feature film, and from their metaphorical and symbolical nature.