“ONE NIGHTMARE REPLACES ANOTHER”: TRAUMA AND MOURNING IN THE AGE OF TERROR THROUGH PAUL AUSTER’S TRAVELS IN THE SCRIPTORIUM AND MAN IN THE DARK.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/REN.2023.i27.2Keywords:
9/11, Auster, trauma, U.S., war, terror, grief, exceptionalismAbstract
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 sent Americans down a spiral of fear and anger that got an immediate response in the form of some of the most controversial legislative moves in the history of the nation, as well as the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sense of invincibility that had dominated the American imaginary evaporated as the dreamlike chaos and anxieties of that day shaped the texts written by some of the renowned American novelists. Among them, Paul Auster with his post-9/11 texts Travels in the Scriptorium (2007) and Man in the Dark (2008), deals with the incommensurability of 9/11 through the anxieties produced by the physical and psychological trauma of two old men trapped in a room, where fiction poses as the way to escape the confinement and where matters of individual and historical memory merge with Auster’s critique of the U.S. War on Terror.
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Accepted 2023-03-09
Published 2023-05-05
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