The Literal American: Rereading Graham Greene in an Age of Security

Inspired by the events of September 11th, the US literary academy reframed its persistent and recurrent anxieties about reading "the other" with a new or newly revived attention to security. This essay outlines the post-9/11 security humanities by reading Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American as a particularly useful engagement with the relationship between security and institutional reading practices. I show how the allegory of reading and insecurity in Greene's novel offers a crucial pedagogical response to the current re-emergence of the role of security in the humanities, particularly with respect to the figure of the American reader in a global moment.