Catherine Morley

Bio: Catherine Morley is an academic researcher from University of Leicester. The author has contributed to research in topics: Innocence & The Imaginary. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 8 publications receiving 48 citations.

How do we write about this? the domestic and the global in the post-9/11 novel

Abstract: This article argues that far from marking a break in recent literary development, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made less of an impact on American fiction than we often think. Critics have often accused writers after 9/11 of “retreating” into the domestic; in fact, domestic and individual narratives, often set against sweeping historical backgrounds, already dominated American writing in the late 1990s. At first, therefore, novelists handling the events of 9/11 framed them within the personal and the small-scale. In the last two years, however, writers such as Adam Haslett and Jonathan Franzen have begun publishing broader, more ambitious state-of-the-nation novels, explicitly addressing the United States' relationship with the Middle East and the impact of globalization. Yet in these novels, too, the global and the personal are tightly intertwined; again and again, writers are drawn to the domestic themes that have so often dominated American literature.

Bardic Aspirations: Philip Roth's Epic of America

Abstract: This article focuses upon the Jewish experience of post-war optimism and ‘innocence’ in Philip Roth's American Pastoral trilogy. The epic sequence retrospectively depicts three lives, each in various ways enchanted and disappointed by the dream of a self-reliant American identity. Mediated from an indefinite moment in the present by Roth's alter-ego, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, the trilogy self-consciously addresses the role of the writer in the construction of a mythical national identity. The three novels of the sequence are presented as historical narratives. They uncover the processes whereby the memories of post-war America became, for better or worse, interlaced with the foundational myths of the United States. Their presiding themes are of disenchantment, and the slow collapse of myriad fictions of nation and race. Oscillating between expressions of escape from an entangled web of memories and explorations of the prerogatives of nostalgia, these works ultimately concern the epic process of unmaking the American ‘race’. Each subverts the phoney rhetoric of nation-building polemicists and myth-makers, yet acknowledges these myths as a formative component of their individual, national and literary identities. Like Joyce, Roth is presented as both fascinated with and repelled by the concept of the epicist as the founder of his people.

Plotting Against America: 9/11 and the Spectacle of Terror in Contemporary American Fiction

Abstract: This article examines the literary preoccupation with the visual image and the seeming impossibility of realism in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Tracing a series of long and short pieces from a selection of authors, this piece examines how writers were quick to register a series of written responses to the events. Beginning with immediate subjective pieces from writers such as Paul Auster, Martin Amis, and Erica Jong, this essay analyses these writers' emphasis on the visual nature of the attacks, from the omnipresence of the television reports to the eyewitness testimony offered by many. It then moves on to concentrate on some of the short stories from Ulrich Baer's edited volume 110 Stories: New York Writes after 9/11 (2002). Focusing on pieces such as Avital Ronell's "This Was a Test" and A.M. Homes's "We All Saw It, or The View From Home," the author identifies a brooding melancholy over the limits of language as a communicative or affective tool. This is then taken up in a longer concentration on Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), both of which emphasise the visual—the latter to the extent of melding the visual with the written in his account of traumatic loss. Using the theoretical apparatuses of Slavoj Zizek and Jean Baudrillard, the author makes the case that all of these writers, to varying degrees, are self-consciously operating in a textual landscape in which the boundaries of literary realism have been altered. According to DeLillo, the real is now "unreal" or "too real" to be portrayed by straightforward realist narratives. Thus, these writers integrate an emphasis on the visual image within their fictions (performance art in the case of DeLillo and actual photographs interspliced with the text in Foer's novel), thereby offering a heightened version of realism in order to accurately portray the realities of post 9/11 socio-cultural and personal landscapes.

THE END OF INNOCENCE: Tales of Terror After 9/11

Abstract: Review of International American Studies (RIAS), is the electronic journal of the International American Studies Association, the only worldwide, independent, nongovernmental association of American Studies. RIAS serves as agora for the global network of international scholars, teachers, and students of America as hemispheric and global phenomenon. RIAS is published three times a year: in the Fall, Winter and Spring by IASA with the institutional support of the University of Silesia in Katowice lending server space to some of IASA websites and the electronic support of the Soft For Humans CMS Designers. Subscription rates or RIAS are included along with the Association’s annual dues as specified in the “Membership” section of the Association’s website (www.iasaweb.org).

Contemporary American Fiction

Abstract: Introduction Chapter 1 'The space reserved for irony': Irony and Paradox in Don DeLillo's White Noise, Paul Auster's City of Glass and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho Chapter 2 Silence, Secrecy and Sexuality: 'Alternate Histories' in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex Chapter 3 'Nes and Yo': Race, Ethnicity and Hybridity in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, Philip Roth's The Human Stain and Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing Chapter 4 Contemporary American Fiction Goes to Hollywood: Genre in the Texts and Films of Cold Mountain, Brokeback Mountain and No Country for Old Men Conclusion

Negotiating Multiple Identities Post-9/11: Hybridity and Transformation in the Reluctant Fundamentalist, Home Boy and Thinner Than Skin

Abstract: The present thesis seeks to explore and analyse three select representative Pakistani diasporic pieces of fiction: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy (2009) and Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner Than Skin (2012) written in the backdrop of 9/11. The research focus is on how hybrid identity (of the Pakistani targeted affectees in the novels) is transformed in the background of 9/11/2001 attacks. The novels negotiate diverse and divisive identities resulting in the transformation of individuals. Unlike a wave of fictional themes such as trauma, fear, disillusionment, Islamophobia, Orientalism, and so forth, these three novels attempt to portray the resultant multiple and conflictive identities in the post-9/11 chaotic world. Postcolonial theory, featuring cultural hybridity, has been invoked as a theoretical framework with particular emphasis on theorists like Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994). However, the researcher probes and substantiates the strategy of disengagement and detachment from the U.S., geographically and ideologically. The theorists and a host of fiction writers have argued engagement and reconciliation between the East and the West, whereas the current discourse in the selected texts reiterates disengagement for greater self-reliance and autonomy. Even Frantz Fanon advocates engagement and reconciliation. Cultural hybridity and transitional transformation are the dominant discourses to be argued in the case of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Home Boy and Thinner Than Skin in the post-9/11 sociopolitical and literary milieu.

Radical Homemaking in Contemporary American Environmental Fiction

Abstract: Ursula K Heise in ‘Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies’ critiques ‘the portrayal of multicultural and sometimes transnational nuclear families as the narrative solution to environmental and political problems’ (Heise, 2008: 383) This essay places Heise’s critique of the ‘ecological family romance’ in conversation with three other ecological domestic fictions: T C Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012) Heise’s critique and Shannon Hayes’ Radical Homemakers (2010) frame my close readings of the novels’ interconnected themes of radical homemaking, transnationalism, and environmentalism My reading of the novels highlights their shared use of marginalized, racially-other characters to develop their entwined romantic and environmental plots (Lalitha in Freedom, several minor characters in A Friend of the Earth, and Ovid in Flight Behavior) and their use of sentimental deaths, especially of key female characters (Lalitha in Freedom, Sierra in A Friend of the Earth, and Dellarobia’s uncertain fate in Flight Behavior) By adopting the sentimental, domestic romance plot for ecological aims, the three novels highlight how environmental aims get stymied when cultural and ecological diversity are relegated to the margins They also suggest that more is gained than lost through their use of ecological allegory While the fictions do not offer solutions, they do push their readers to confront the Anthropocene’s ecological realities and their radical domestic-environmental politics

Bibliography for the Study of Phillip Roth's Works

Abstract: Part of the American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Education Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, Television Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons

Globalization, US Imperialism and Fundamentalism: A Study of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract: Mohsin Hamid's novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007, engages with the complex issues of Islam and the West, fundamentalism and America's War on Terror. As a “counterhistory” to post-9/11 Islamophobia, the novel contests common notions of terror as an unreasonable ideology of retribution and redemption by exposing the trajectories of imperialism. Analyzing The Reluctant Fundamentalist from the political perspective of a 9/11 novel, this paper aims to create counterintuitive rethinking on the Clash of Civilizations theory and to elucidate the linkages between new American imperialism, fundamentalism, globalization and terrorism.