REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TERRORIST OTHER:
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TERRORIST OTHER:

Summary/Abstract: The 9/11 attack on the WTC twin towers and the Pentagon is one of those hard facts of history and of life for which no excuses would or should be found. Followed by the Madrid attack in 2004 and the London one in 2005, 9/11 stands as a landmark for a new era of a kind of terrorism which still has to be identified and dealt with. Shall we focus in our attempt to do so on retaliatory responses to strike at the very heart of an elusive, yet all-encompassing evil, of which the “war on terror”, that started in Afghanistan and continued in Iraq at despicable costs of human life and civilization, has been the most recent example, or shall we try to find a moral/ethical solution to the us/them seemingly irreconcilable opposition? In my attempt to answer the question I intend to juxtapose the US official discourse on terrorism and the “enemy” with the representation of the terrorist Other in contemporary American fiction so as to point out the unique way in which literature about terrorism addresses this catastrophic, essentially “transformative event” by returning to history and politics and thus becoming again engaged in the vital issues of life.

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