| Dimensions of Terror(ism): Apocalypse, History, Rhetoric, Aesthetics (w/C. Lit 549) | Blau | MW 3:30-5:20 | 13259 |
Dimensions of Terror(ism): Apocalypse, History, Rhetoric, Aesthetics
It may be regressive or even weird, but there are those for whom regeneration depends upon some innate embrace of ordained disaster, as if Apocalypse were in our souls. And if you don’t believe in the soul, or that soul, there are evangelicals, jihadists, and suicide bombers who apparently do, ready to bring about what the holy books have declared, or after the collapsing towers, what seemed written in the dust at Ground Zero, this “disturbing premise: namely, that the world as we know it is coming to an end in the very near future.” That prospect was formulated, after 9/11, in a Jungian study of divine vengeance and terrorism, as if updating the Qu’ran or the Book of Revelation. You may be Freudian instead of Jungian, or indifferent to psychoanalysis, or so entirely secular and unmythic, that all symbolism of the world’s end is meaningless or hysterical, and yet it’s hard to read a newspaper, watch TV, see aliens in the movies, or even play video games, without some pulsation of ultimate terror, while actual forms of terrorism spread with globalization.
With conspiracy theories too, the charges have been reversed, about who really caused 9/11. Was it really al-Qaeda or was the Bush administration complicit, as with the lies about Iraq? There are now books about that, like The Terror Conspiracy. Still, vanity of vanities, the war on terror proceeds, and while we hear of insurgencies there, there’s still anxiety here, which may be deflected now by debates over health care, deficits, or the bailing out of banks. But even for the liberal left, homeland security would be the top priority again, if (or is it when?), instead of the Empire State Building, the Space Needle were toppled by an explosion in Seattle, while a bomb went off in a baby carriage in a shopping mall in Idaho, coordinated with a car bombing off in North Dakota. Meanwhile, since that egregious day in New York, and its hypermediated images, there has been an unceasing discourse on terror and terrorism, from every theoretical, historical, or socio/political perspective, with studies of its origins, its rhetoric, and attention to the aesthetic—the most scandalous of which, perhaps, was the observation by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, that the planes crashing into the World Trade Center produced the greatest work of art that has ever been.
Whatever you think of that—and there are those who saw it and felt the same—there will be other disturbing issues in the various books we’ll be reading, which are not literary in the usual sense, but from the provocative library accumulating, non-fiction works on the facet-planes of terror. As we read, however, we might keep in mind, say, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the first novel on a suicide bomber, or Dostoyevsky’s Demons, or Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. We’ve not only had a copious array of novels on our dreadful theme, but the drama has been haunted by it since Euripides’ The Bacchae, though Karl Kraus tried to bring it to an end with The Last Days of Mankind. By now, apocalypse may be some literary dementia or, like Beckett’s Endgame, “finished, nearly finished,” some fatal inheritance of once-sacred wishful thinking. In any case, the immanence of terror(ism) inhabits our thought, even when repressed or displaced, and the seminar will risk engaging with it—including the historical irony that terrorists, from Menachem Begin to Nelson Mandela, may become liberators, though the liberator in power may also become a dictator.
Seminar presentations and a final essay may, in relation to the books assigned, draw upon novels, drama, and poetry as well.
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