UC Berkeley

This dissertation proposes a new analytical category for thinking about a subset of post-9/11 Anglophone novels that are engaged with the political aftermath of 9/11. I designate this category the post-American novel, distinguishing it from the category of 9/11 fiction. While the 9/11 novel is a sub-genre of national literature, focusing on the terrorist attacks as a national trauma, the post-American novel is a transnational literary form that decenters 9/11, either by contextualizing the terrorist attacks in relation to other historical traumas or by shifting focus to the “War on Terror.” I theorize the post-American novel as the literary expression of international opposition to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. International opposition to the Iraq War exposed the fractures in American global hegemony, and so I define the post-American novel as the historically-engaged novel of the crisis of American hegemony. I develop this argument through a detailed analysis of the political aesthetics of some representative post-American novels by four international writers. In various ways, these novels all diagnose post-9/11 American society from an international perspective and subvert the myth of American exceptionalism, though their forms of cultural and political critique are more far-ranging than this. The category of the post-American novel is not meant to herald the end of American literature. And though I peg its emergence to the second Iraq War, the category is flexible enough to encompass a range of contemporary novels by international writers who explore the role of the United States in a changing world.