New URI course to focus on impact of 9/11 on literature

Prof. Alain-Philippe Durand knew he had hit a nerve when his French class at the University of Rhode Island discussed a controversial novel about 9/11, Windows on the World, two years ago.

The book, written by Frederick Beigbeder, was then only available in French. Durand hoped its provocative subject — an imagining of the terror and violence that transpired in the North Tower just as the first plane hit the World Trade Center — would spark lively debate in the French conversation class.

But the professor said he was not prepared for the intensity of the discussion or the complexity of the issues it revealed.

“The students were divided into two camps. One side said, ‘Who does this guy think he is …. This Frenchman thinks he knows more about the U.S. than we do,’ ” said Durand. “The other half of the class was completely the opposite. They thought a novel on this should have been written earlier, and that the only way to confront these issues is to talk about them.”

A few months later, Durand edited a book, Novels of Contemporary Extreme, with his colleague, Naomi Mandel, an associate professor of English who specializes in literature of the Holocaust. Durand began to see a connection between writings about the Holocaust and the profusion of novels, documentaries, movies and nonfiction books about 9/11 that had started to come out.

“Who has the right to tell the story?” Durand said. “Should it be only those people who experienced it first hand? What do you do when all those people are dead?”

These questions prompted Durand to create a new class at URI’s Kingston campus. In January, an honors seminar for 20 students, conducted in English, will explore the impact of 9/11 through literature and film.

“What I am really hoping is that by having some discussion, that will help us come to terms with the event itself,” Durand said. “One of the main questions will be is there, or should there be, such a thing as the literature of 9/11 the way there is a literature of the Holocaust.”

The class will explore the terrorist attacks through various media including comic books, photography, nonfiction books, the federal government’s 9/11 Commission Report, novels, documentaries and feature films.

“There will be a section on testimonials of survivors put together by New York Times journalists and a section on theories about violence by intellectuals like Susan Sontag,” Durand said. “There will also be a section on the conspiracy theories about 9/11 by this group of people, educated people like professors and architects, who are arguing that September 11 did not happen as it was presented but that it was orchestrated by the U.S. government.”

Durand is already thinking about what form the discussion will take if some students believe the conspiracy theory.

“Maybe by going through all the materials in the course, they will change their mind,” he said. “But everyone will be free to say what they want as long as they are respectful to the other students.”

The course will also analyze different approaches to retelling the events of 9/11, comparing a French documentary about the New York firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center to feature films, such as United 93. That movie starred unknown actors and was filmed with hand-held cameras to capture the ragged, shocking nature of the hijacking of the doomed plane. Durand also plans to show Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, a big-budget studio production starring Nicholas Cage, and an HBO movie on the terrorists behind the attacks, called The Hamburg Cell.

“I want the students to discuss how different writers and filmmakers have chosen to represent such an event and also to discuss the different approaches,” Durand said.

Durand said that five years after the terrorist attacks, many people feel ready to explore the issues raised by 9/11.

“In part, it’s a question of time,” he said. “On September 12, people like [David] Letterman and [Jay] Leno didn’t have a show. They didn’t see how they could go on the air and try to tell jokes after what had happened.”

But within a few days, network television decided it was time to return to some semblance of normalcy, and late-night comedians returned to the air.

Literature is dead in America. Maybe it still exists in England. What we have passing for literature now is Proust translated to Turkish and updated a century (why the h did Pamuk choose that quote from Coleridge?). WW II was about the end of it.

So, in other words, it's going to be pure fiction. "The intellectual" Susan Sontag and NYTimes "journalists" - oh, please. ROTFLMAO!

'Literature is dead in America'.

I am beginning to think so too. With the Pulitzer Prize winners and the Nobel prize-winners for lit., I don't know how anyone can think otherwise.

The discouraging thing is the total silence on the matter.

Poetry and fiction show nothing but a kind of bland limpness.

The only alternative is heavy sex and violence and cynicism.

And all of it badly written. Somethinbg I have noted for years but no-one in the literary community has the guts to discuss it, and conservatives are all completely absorbed by the political scene.

We have no critics worth of the name.

Believeing conspiracy theories should be grounds for expulsion from universities.

"Believeing conspiracy theories should be grounds for expulsion from universities."

Hey, let's get a secret group together to make it happen.

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