講題：Remembering 9/11 in Literature and Film: Transnational Approaches to Ground Zero
時間：97年1月15日（二） 上午10:00
地點：文305 (中山大學文學院3樓 外文系305會議室）
主持：黃心雅教授（中山大學外文系）
When two planes flew into the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, the world was torn between two impressions: On the one hand, what was broadcast on TV—uncannily uniting spectators around the globe—was strangely familiar; it seemed as if we had seen those images before. Movies like Independence Day and The Sum of All Fears were recalled, and analogies were drawn to Oklahoma City or Pearl Harbor. On the other hand, this was an entirely new dimension of violence on American ground: no previous terrorist attack had had this kind of impact on the Western world. The event was soon considered to mark the end of an era; and the beginning of the 21st century. While journalists struggled to comment on the "indescribable event" (Marianne Hirsch) and personal experiences dominated the memory, fiction writers and film directors were at a loss for words. As Lynn Sharon Schwartz summarized it, "we are very tired of our stories, but we don't know what the next sentence should be."
Six years after the terrorist attacks, this silence has been broken. Many novels, short stories, plays, and films have been published which directly address 9/11. Entering the space of the unspeakable through text, works by Jonathan Safran Foer, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, Fr眤d眤ric Beigbeder, Nick McDonell, Art Spiegelman, Martin Amis, Claire Messud, Philip Beard, John Updike, Don DeLillo, and many others not only provide fictional re-enactments necessary for cultural catharsis and healing but they negotiate the contact zones of individual and collective identity, documentary and fiction, and of the national and global impact that informs our (re)construction of September 11. This lecture will introduce some of these reactions, from both the U.S. and Europe, in order to illustrate the many ways by which literature and film contribute to our collective memory of 9/11. It will also raise questions about aesthetics in a traumatic context: can (and may) art frame this kind of event, and thus link terror to the beautiful? |