Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Indiana University South Bend for supporting my research with two sabbaticals and two summer faculty fellowships . I also thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for allowing me to spend part of the summer of 1994 at Yale in a seminar directed by R. W. B. Lewis. Patrick Brantlinger of Indiana University Bloomington provided encouragement in the early stages, and I am especially grateful to him for bringing Mick Taussig’s essay on “Terrorism as Usual” to my attention. As chairs of the English department, Jim Blodgett and Eleanor Lyons provided help in dozens of ways, and I want to thank them for that otherwise thankless task. Elizabeth Cotter of the IUSB Interlibrary Loan department and her successor, Maureen Kennedy, made dozens of obscure books and articles almost instantly available. Friends and family provided support, reading lists, and laughter. As always, my husband, John, read every draft of every chapter, providing invaluable advice on everything from pronoun references to legal citations . Our sons, Christopher, Patrick, and Andrew, were resolutely partisan at every stage and learned fortitude from years of Kraft dinners and frozen pizza. I owe a great deal to my colleagues at Indiana University South Bend, but particularly to those who often lunch in the faculty lounge of Wiekamp Hall: Jim Blodgett, Linda Chen, Margarete Feinstein , Pat Furlong, Roy Schreiber, Monica Tetzlaff, Lesley Walker, and Tammy Fong Morgan. At those Socratic symposia only the purest English is spoken, the loftiest topics entertained, viz. the fortunes of the Chair-Tossing coach on the mother campus, the suitability of the BetterKnown University across Town for our graduation, and ways of finding international films and food in northern Indiana. ix The longer I spend in college teaching the more grateful I am to my own teachers, whose patience seems in retrospect to have been infinite. In particular, I would like to thank Jane Sherwin Schwartz and the late Robert Dalziel, extraordinary undergraduate teachers I still try to emulate. This book is dedicated to my parents. My mother was a great reader, the only one I knew before college. She read aloud to me, when I was nine and ten and eleven, books that might otherwise have been encountered much later, as an obligation, but were pure pleasure then. I still hear her accents, and even detect her occasional bowdlerisms, in the texts of Willa Cather, the Brontës, and Mark Twain. My father, like many another immigrant’s son, loved American public education and was never happier than when regaling us with stories about working his way through college or coaching basketball and teaching in small Iowa high schools. As it is much easier to contract an enthusiasm than to follow advice, I remain grateful not only for their love, but for what they loved. Earlier versions of the following chapters appeared in the following journals, and I thank their editors for permission to reprint: chapter one: “Writers among Terrorists: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and the Rushdie Affair ,” Modern Fiction Studies, 40.2 (summer 1994): 229–52; chapter three: “Terrorists, Artists, and Intellectuals: Mary McCarthy’s Cannibals and Missionaries,” in Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and Her Work, ed. Eve Stwertka and Margo Viscusi, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996, 35–42; chapter four: “Language and the Politics of Despair in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist,” 23.2 (winter 1990), NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, copyright NOVEL Corp. ©1990; chapter five: “Incriminating Documents: Nechaev and Dostoevsky in J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg,” Philological Quarterly 76 (fall 1998): 463–77; chapter six: “Terror as Usual in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Assignment,” Modern Language Quarterly 52.1 (March 1991): 86–99; chapter eight: “Literature at the Margins: The Terrorist as Novelist in Antoine Volodine’s Lisbonne dernière marge,” New Novel Review 3.1 (October 1995): 67–82. Scholarly conferences provided the first opportunities to test many of the ideas in this book; I especially want to thank Tony Jackson for organizing the history and literature panel at MLA in 1995 and Alex x Acknowledgments Houen for inviting me to lecture at the Political Violence and Literature Conference at King’s College, Cambridge, in August 1997. I would also like to thank Cathie Brettschneider of the University Press of Virginia for her help in bringing this manuscript to press. Jane Curran edited the copy expertly and...