Writing of Terrorism: Contemporary American Fiction and Maurice Blanchot

Christian Kloeckner teaches North American literature and culture at the University of Bonn. His research interests include literature and political violence, (post-)modernist poetry, memorial culture, discourses of race and class, and the intersections of financialization, debt, and nostalgia in U.S. culture.

• Terrorism in postmodern and neorealist American fiction – Maurice Blanchot – Paul Auster’s debt to Blanchot – Aesthetics of rupture and transgression – Relationship of writing, terror, freedom, and death – Power of literature – Alterity – Emmanuel Levinas – The sublime – Terrorism as spectacle in global consumer culture

«In enlisting Blanchot’s thinking in order to understand better the relation between literature and violence, Christian Kloeckner does not aim, however, to examine the thematic treatment of terrorism in selected novels as such, but rather ‘to analyse [them] for the ways in which they relate terrorism to the act of writing and the question of literature’s power’ (p. 19). To this end, he offers an often astute, well-informed analysis of Auster’s early prose and poetry, and tracks with illuminating persistence the trace left on Auster by his encounter with Blanchot.»(Leslie Hill, French Studies Volume 72, Issue 1 2018)