Joseph Conte
Professor of English at the University at Buffalo since 1988, where I teach twentieth and twenty-first century literature with an emphasis on postmodernism, transnational politics in post-9/11 fiction, the global novel, multimodal literature, film adaptation of the novel, postmodern theory, literature and science, literature of migration, and modern poetry and poetics.
I am pleased to announce the publication of my book from Routledge in November 2019, Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, available in hardback (9780367236069) and eBook (9780429280733). Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel suggests that literature after September 11, 2001 reflects the shift from bilateral nation-state politics to the multilateralism of transnational politics. While much of the criticism regarding novels of 9/11 tends to approach these works through theories of personal and collective trauma, this book argues for the evolution of a post-9/11 novel that pursues a transversal approach to global conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests. These novels embrace not only American writers such as Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Thomas Pynchon, and Amy Waldman but also the countervailing perspectives of global novelists such as J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Mohsin Hamid, and Laila Halaby. These are not novels about terror(ism), nor do they seek comfort in the respectful cloak of national mourning. Rather, they are instances of the novel in terror, which recognizes that everything having been changed after 9/11, only the formally inventive presentation will suffice to acknowledge the event’s unpresentability and its shock to the political order.
My book, Design & Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction, received the Agee Prize in American Literary Scholarship from the University of Alabama Press in 2002. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry was published by Cornell University Press in 1991 and reissued as an ebook in 2016. Book chapters and articles on a wide range of contemporary fiction and poetry have appeared in Trump Fiction: Essays on Donald Trump in Literature, Film, and Television; American Literature in Transition: 1990-2000; Modern Fiction Studies; Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction; The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo; The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism; Dictionary of Literary Biography; Sagetrieb; and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, among others.
I have been a SUNY Senior Fellow at the New York—St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture in St. Petersburg, Russia and Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China. I have been awarded a University at Buffalo Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship, a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellowship, and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities. I received my Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1988.
Phone: (716) 645-0696
Address: Department of English
306 Clemens Hall
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260-4610
I am pleased to announce the publication of my book from Routledge in November 2019, Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, available in hardback (9780367236069) and eBook (9780429280733). Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel suggests that literature after September 11, 2001 reflects the shift from bilateral nation-state politics to the multilateralism of transnational politics. While much of the criticism regarding novels of 9/11 tends to approach these works through theories of personal and collective trauma, this book argues for the evolution of a post-9/11 novel that pursues a transversal approach to global conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests. These novels embrace not only American writers such as Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Thomas Pynchon, and Amy Waldman but also the countervailing perspectives of global novelists such as J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Mohsin Hamid, and Laila Halaby. These are not novels about terror(ism), nor do they seek comfort in the respectful cloak of national mourning. Rather, they are instances of the novel in terror, which recognizes that everything having been changed after 9/11, only the formally inventive presentation will suffice to acknowledge the event’s unpresentability and its shock to the political order.
My book, Design & Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction, received the Agee Prize in American Literary Scholarship from the University of Alabama Press in 2002. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry was published by Cornell University Press in 1991 and reissued as an ebook in 2016. Book chapters and articles on a wide range of contemporary fiction and poetry have appeared in Trump Fiction: Essays on Donald Trump in Literature, Film, and Television; American Literature in Transition: 1990-2000; Modern Fiction Studies; Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction; The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo; The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism; Dictionary of Literary Biography; Sagetrieb; and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, among others.
I have been a SUNY Senior Fellow at the New York—St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture in St. Petersburg, Russia and Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China. I have been awarded a University at Buffalo Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship, a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellowship, and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities. I received my Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1988.
Phone: (716) 645-0696
Address: Department of English
306 Clemens Hall
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260-4610
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Conference Presentations by Joseph Conte
The attacks on September 11, 2001 ushered in the Age of Terror, which is an epistemic shift in American polity from the virtual capital that fueled the dot-com boom of the 1990s to a twenty-first century marked by asymmetrical warfare across the globe. Post-9/11 narratives may turn wholly on the spectacular events of that day, or they may take account of the collective transformation in the social order, politics, psychopathology, or modes of representation in the arts. Post-9/11 narratives are not, however, a sub-genre of the novel because genres have rules of literary style, and fictions that reference 9/11 are too diverse to comply with such rules. This essay will collect prominent examples into four categories according to their modes of address, their verbal mood or modality. First, the Indicative mood, in novels that make a direct address toward the event, in which the representation and experience of the attacks on 9/11 is a pivotal element of the narrative structure. Second, the Subjunctive mood, in which the event occurs offstage and the characters are proximate witnesses to the attacks. The conditional modality lends itself to works of fabulation, reflexivity, or metafiction. Third, the Interrogative mood, in whose questioning of the nature of the attacks political, judicial, or cross-cultural arguments are broached, often with regard to Islamophobia. Fourth, the Demonstrative mood, in books that document that such a thing is or was the case, in narratives of historical realism that critique the social order both before and after 9/11.
Cosmopolitanism occupies the same pathways of (de)differentiation and (de)territorialization as globalization, but at every point its relation to the hegemonic flow is transversal rather than oppositional, diagonal rather than dialectical. Transversality in Deleuze and Guattari’s “lines of flight” accounts for hybridity, the combination of elements that correspond obliquely on what would otherwise be separate and non-communicating pathways. Transversals are “double captures” with the potential for change that affects both elements in a correspondence.
I read the post-9/11 global novel as an expression of transversal politics, as narratives that expose the différend which resists translation into a single global idiom; and I identify those characters who are cosmopolites, global citizens, who instigate a shared deterritorialization or double capture, or who may be types of an ethnocentric nationalism advanced by the 2016 Presidential election that is in the process of transversal transformation. I examine four novels that traverse in bi-social fashion the fractious relationship between Islam and the west. Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) confront the profiling, racism, and backlash towards Muslims in America after 9/11. The protagonists of both novels are well-educated professionals and nonobservant Muslims who are forced by political circumstance to reconsider their citizenship, their practices, and their faith. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King (2012) reconsider the American abroad who is both naïf and ugly in his encounter with the other, innocent and guilty of the civilized savaging of a foreign land. All four protagonists leave the US to become global citizens.
The irony of such a massive migration into Italy and the European Union would not be lost on Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, whose story, “The Long Crossing,” concerns Sicilian villagers who are conned by that day’s version of human traffickers into believing they will be deposited (as illegal immigrants) on the shores of New Jersey. Between thirty-five and fifty percent of the mostly single males who ventured to L’America returned to Italy; the ritornati were indeed remigrants. In Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s film, Big Night (1996), chef Primo considers whether to return to work in his uncle’s restaurant in Rome, against his brother Secondo’s conviction that only America provides the opportunity for advancement. Migrants into both the United States and Italy have faced isolationist, xenophobic and anti-immigration political parties such as the Northern League and the Tea Party
The transnational politics of Against the Day should then be understood not only as an historical analysis of the rise and fall of an anti-authoritarian movement in the fin de siècle but also as a work of post-9/11 literature intended to provoke an oppositional response to the current political crisis of the War on Terror. Invoking Santayana’s famous maxim in The Life of Reason (1905), “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Pynchon’s historical bilocation suggests that those who most vigorously investigate the suppressed history of the last century are most well equipped to interrogate the political crises instigated by present-day plutocrats.
Pynchon’s sympathies with an international Anarchist movement that sought to dislodge plutocrats from power and turn the material assets of the industrial monopolies over to the workers are in evidence in the novel. There are references throughout its more than a thousand pages to the spate of attacks on European royalty and heads of state before and after the centenary. These attacks followed the international Anarchist principle of “propaganda of the deed” that promoted physical violence against political enemies as a way of inspiring the masses and catalyzing revolution. Pynchon draws our attention to the striking parallels between the terrorism and transnational politics of 1901 and 2001—but what we should infer from these references is for us to decide.
The featured character in Point Omega is Richard Elster, a retired scholar (exactly DeLillo’s age of 73) recruited to the E ring of the Pentagon, given a security clearance, and tasked with conceptualizing the war in Iraq, “to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counter-insurgency.” Elster theorizes a “haiku war … in three lines,” that is, “a set of ideas linked to transient things.” Clearly that’s not the war that we got. Elster is pursued in his disgrace, “Wolfowitz went to the World Bank. That was exile,” by a documentary filmmaker, Jim Finley, who wants to feature Elster in a film conceived as an extended monologue, “just a man and a wall.” There would be no archival footage, no cutaways, no off-camera interviewer posing provocative questions; only Elster in “one continuous take” speaking whatever comes to mind.
Elster confers with the “fantasists of the Pentagon” who, in devising their war plan for Iraq, “created reality.” In a not overly subtle reference to the missing weapons-of-mass-destruction and an al-Qaeda in Iraq that appears only after the invasion, Elster remarks, “There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create.” Some will recall the New York Times Magazine essay by Ron Suskind in 2004 in which Suskind was told by an anonymous senior advisor to George W. Bush that journalists of his sort were “in what we call the reality-based community,” who sought empirical evidence for their assertions. In contrast, the administration regarded itself as “an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Something like that inversion of fiction and reality occurs in “Point Omega,” whose title refers to the French paleontologist and Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the final evolution of human consciousness, the Omega Point, where matter and consciousness are one. In the conceptual universe of DeLillo’s novel, reality and fiction move asymptotically toward Teilhard’s Omega Point.