The city and catastrophe in 9/11 novels

Abstract

In this thesis, I formulate ways of ethical responses to 9/11 as a catastrophe, problematizing how different strategies of ethical engagement change memory objects from an amalgamation of closed personal histories to relational and social constructs. Using Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), I propose to analyze how different strategies of ethical engagement figure in the contemporary 9/11 novels. From the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation who already seeks a way out of connection with the rest of the outside of world with all its petty traumatic events and banalities; to the protagonists of Falling Man as immediate victims of a horrific event, the event par excellence; and the distant flaneur émigré of Open City who flattens all catastrophes into a general pattern of suffering in history is a line that meanders through the ethical implications of an engagement and disengagement with the city, its geography, and its habitants.