"Terminal Crisis?" From the Worlding of American Literature to World-System Literature

Abstract

The problem is to find a central figure in whose life all the important extremes of the world of the novel converge and around whom a complete world with all its vital contradictions can be organized. I felt as though a world had ended. Has the American novel become worldier since 9/11? Has the force of the World Trade Center attacks led writers toward a sustained inspection of America's relationship to the rest of the globe? Bruce Robbins, looking at a broad range of contemporary novels, says no. The post-9/11 novel does a number of things instead: it becomes disoriented, retreats into domesticity, or (at best) treats an outside world of unmitigated suffering and absurdity that justifies immigration in a “coming to America” narrative. All in all, Robbins finds mistaken the “gently self-congratulatory” proposition that the American novel has become more global in its perspective, and in that sense more worldly (1096).

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