Introduction: Re/presentations of Crisis in Twenty-First-Century US Literature and Culture

These are the times that try men's souls.

—Thomas Paine 11

All true criticism occurs in the mode of crisis.

—Paul de Man 8

Between 1776 and 1783, during the American Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine wrote a series of inspirational newspaper articles entitled The American Crisis. The first of these, "Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America on the Following Interesting Subjects…," was famously read by George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Trenton and sold over 120,000 copies in three months. Paine's crisis pamphlets unquestionably contributed to the forging of a new national identity as they urged settler Americans to revolt against a distant, tyrant ruler, which gave them a new sense of independence and purpose. Two centuries later, in the aftermath of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, Barack Obama's first speech as the forty-fourth president of the United States, delivered on January 20, 2009, defined contemporary American history in terms of national crisis and collective responsibility in a global context in which pressing economic, sociopolitical, educational, ethical, and environmental conflicts pointed at the demise of the so-called "American Century" (Smith):

Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land—a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

(Obama, par. 4 and 5)

While the turn of the new millennium was received with general optimism in the United States, the first two decades of the twenty-first century proved to be much more tumultuous than expected. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 shattered to pieces both America's real and symbolical sense of national security; they became an abrupt irruption of cold global reality that, once again, set "history in motion" for the average American (Garcés, Nueva ilustración 14; our translation). These attacks were immediately followed by international military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and by natural catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city of New Orleans in 2005 leaving a death toll of almost 1,500 citizens. The situation was further aggravated by the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the worst the world had seen since the Great Depression. In the new globalized world of closely interdependent economies, what in the summer of 2007 seemed to be merely a local subprime mortgage crisis eventually reintroduced the world to an era of bank failures, credit crunches, private defaults, and huge layoffs affecting almost every part of the world and not just the United States.

All of these events have notoriously heightened the sense of historical downfall alluded to in Obama's speech and propelled Americans from a century that was globally dominated by US politics and culture into an unknown future—one now led by President Donald Trump and his controversial group of advisors. Moreover, current global preoccupations—including destabilized markets and low oil prices, high debt levels, the rise of new nationalisms, Brexit, media manipulation and the effects of post-truth, anti-intellectual trends, terrorism, and the ongoing refugee crises in the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa—uphold the pervasive notion that we are witnessing much more than a national or economic crisis; we are enmeshed in a global crisis wherein moral, civic, and environmental responsibilities are slowly but relentlessly shaking the social and cultural imaginaries of the West.

It is important to highlight, however, that none of these twenty-first-century...