Terrorism and American Literature (ePub)

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: In his essay "'God save us from the bourgeois adventure': The
Figure of the Terrorist in Contemporary American Conspiracy Fiction"
(1996), written in the aftermath of the 1993 attack on the World Trade
Center, Steffen Hantke remarks how quickly politicians, the media, and
the public at that time agreed that the bombing had to be understood as
part of a larger confrontation between Western democracies and 'Islamic
Fundamentalism' (for the following comp. 1996: 219-222). He goes on to
argue that the then newly discovered enemy 'Islamic terrorism' had filled
the vacancy in the collective political imagination that was left by the
demise of Communism in the late 1980ies, and that this new conflict
continued the kind of cultural paranoia that had sustained the historical
narrative of the Cold War era. Hantke describes cultural paranoia as the
effect of a cultural machinery that amalgamates complex political contexts
and historical developments into homogeneous and larger-than-life
cultural abstractions against which the collective political imagination can
construct itself as a unified entity. In other words, cultural paranoia
creates a sprawling narrative of the nation/the American way of
life/Western civilization under threat that legitimizes state power, ensures
compliance with dominant social norms and unifies the nation by
stigmatizing dissent as treason.