Event date: Tuesday 17 March 2009, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room 

“A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopia after 9/11” given by Professor Efraim Sicher (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

“In the aftermath of 9/11, dystopian fiction has become a fact, no longer a cautionary tale of the imagination. But then destruction is embedded in Western culture and apocalyptic disaster becomes a re-visioning of familiar cultural paradigms and scenarios. Indeed, postwar America was a site of catastrophe before the planes struck the WTC, satirized by Don DeLillo, while the attacks on New York must be seen in terms of postmodern aesthetic theory expounded by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Finally, Frédéric Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Safran Foer respond to 9/11 in novels that grapple with the implications for representation and for the novel form of 9/11 and its aftermath. What 9/11 showed is that the relation of the real and the imagined in dystopian fiction was reversed, as both lived experience and hypermediated image.”

Professor Efraim Sicher teaches English and comparative literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. He has published widely on Charles Dickens, George Eliot, dystopia, Holocaust memory and the transmission of trauma in post-Holocaust novels. His recent books includeRereading Dickens/Rereading the City (AMS Press, 2003) and The Holocaust Novel (Routledge, 2005).