Seminar Cultures of Fear Literary and Cinematic Representations of Terrorism and Counterterrorism Mi 12.30

In their study Terror and Taboo (1996), social anthropologists Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass argue that -'The unspeakable act of terrorism' is the quintessential taboo in contemporary discourse,- and that for this reason, -the very attempt to 'know' how the terrorist thinks [...] can be deemed an abomination.- The tabooing of terrorism and its perpetrators became particularly prominent after the attacks of 11 September 2001, when the official discourse of the Bush and Blair administrations equated terrorism with -evil.- In the words of political scientist Richard Jackson, the clear implication of the post-9/11 rhetoric of evil was that -the terrorists behave as they do not because they are rationally calculating political actors but simply because it is in their nature to be evil,- meaning that there is little use in investigating the circumstances, motivations, and goals of their violence. To say that terrorism is -taboo- is not to say that the issue is absent from public discourse, however. Quite the contrary, in fact: from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, the type of political violence known as -sub-state terrorism- has generated much media attention and public interest, and it has frequently featured in popular culture (for instance, in Hollywood blockbusters). In some cases, writers have dared to -attempt to 'know' how the terrorist thinks- even after 9/11, when several eminent novelists portrayed either the real terrorist cell around Muhammad Atta or imaginary terrorists. In this course, we will investigate if and, if yes, how literary and cinematic representations of terrorism have managed to go beyond what Zulaika and Douglass describe as -terrorism discourse.- We will begin with a discussion of the notorious problem of defining terrorism. Following a short introduction to the origins and developments of clandestine political violence, we will then engage in historically informed readings of works from around 1900 (when the topic of sub-state terrorism against public targets first appeared in literature) and the present day in order to trace both continuities and changes in terrorism fiction. Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent will be a key text in our discussions, since it was the first literary work to portray a counterterrorist conspiracy. While Conrad acknowledges the destabilizing effects of terrorist violence on the target society, his novel implies that the true source of these effects is not the threat of terrorism per se; it is the way that threat undermines the status quo by eliciting new, formerly illegal measures in the name of countering terrorism a theme that would reappear in several later works. Books to be purchased : (1.) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), ISBN: 978-0199536351; (2.) John Updike, Terrorist (Penguin, 2007), ISBN: 978-0141027845. All other course reading will be made available electronically on ILIAS. Englisch (MA, PO 2013) Universität Düsseldorf SoSe 2016 Dr. Frank Michael