Post-9/11 Great American Novel

A study of the confluences between liberal white Americans' trauma, their reverting to hyper-conservative Islamophobia, and Don DeLillo's call to American authors that they compose a new so-called 'Great American Novel' pluriverse in the wake of 9/11.In December 2001, Don DeLillo urged American writers to create "e;the counternarrative"e; that would reclaim control of culture in a call for nation-rebuilding fiction that mirrors John William de Forest's original post-Civil War coinage of the term and concept of the "e;Great American Novel."e; Through this conceptual framework, Sheheryar Sheikh examines four major post-9/11 works to demonstrate a concerted effort by these authors to address the "e;Muslim Question"e; in novels that feature and critique traumatized white Americans creating mechanisms with which to mitigate the trauma of 9/11 as it resurges at even the thought of Muslims existing in America after 9/11. By looking at repression, appropriation, adversarial othering, and enforced secularization as they appear in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, John Updike's Terrorist, DeLillo's Falling Man, and Amy Waldman's The Submission, this study shows the iterations of "e;solutions"e; and the abandonment of these ideals by traumatized white liberals. While the original concept of the Great American Novel featured fluid and multifaceted explorations of the American Dream, The Post-9/11 Great American Novel shows how this renewed interest in creating nation-rebuilding texts threatened to stagnate and calcify this literary form. Specifically, because these texts primarily congeal around the occlusion of Muslims and Islam within and from the United States.