MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Most of the current scholarship on 9/11 literature focuses on the 9/11 novel’s attempt to provide a narrative structure to an unspeakable tragedy. In Out of the Blue, Kristiaan Versluys discusses how the novel “provides a context for what seems to be without context… . integrating what happened into a meaningful narrative.” Richard Gray, in After the Fall, explains that 9/11 “reignited [American writers’] interest in a paradox that lies at the heart of writing … the speaking of silence, the search for verbal forms that reach beyond the condition of words, the telling of a tale that cannot yet must be told.” The problem with this approach, which relies heavily on trauma theory to engage with the 9/11 novel, is that it does not account for the frenzy of media forms that exist within so many 9/11 novels.

Ewa Kowal writes of the 9/11 novel: “Never in literature have there been so many TV sets.” She explains that “for characters of post-9/11 novels … the only sense of order, permanence and stability continues to be provided by the omnipresent and inescapable TV sets.” My paper argues that authors use the backdrop of 9/11 to portray the landscape of media relations in the new millennium. More specifically, these novelists use a confluence of media forms to expose cultural anxiety over the print novel’s historically precarious position within the new media ecology. Through a close reading of Jess Walter’s The Zero, my paper will investigate the novel through the lens of media theory; in doing so, I hope to illuminate ways in which the 9/11 novel eschews the portrait of a competitive media field and explores ways in which old and new media forms evolve through a process of remediation.