Trauma's Gap. How the Recipient's Triggered Agency in Amy Waldman's novel 'The Submission' and Michael Moore's Movie 'Fahrenheit 9/11' Creates a New Pattern of Narrative Memory by Turning Ungrievable into Grievable Lives

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Essay from the year 2016 in the subject American Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,3, Leiden University, language: English, abstract: This paper argues that, contrary to politics and news coverage, both Amy Waldman's novel "The Submission" and Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" give the audience the chance to not rationally understand, but to emotionally recognize the "other" as grievable within the representational gap that is created through the narrated relation of the I to the face. This emotionally recognized narrative of the other can become part of the narrative memory into which traumatic recall should be turned, and therefore also is moresuccessful in the overcoming of trauma's gap than the public medial narrative.After the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, two major narratives emerged: The trauma of the US citizens and the defense against the evil other. Both are connected on a psychological and political level. The us vs. them dichotomy, the traumatized good Americans against the evil Muslims, existed before the attacks and was reinforced afterwards.The trauma of the individual American was partly instrumentalized and militarized for political purposes, leading to a perception of the Muslim other not only as evil, but also as ungrievable. Judith Butler discusses the notion of the ungrievable other in her publication Precarious Life. She sees the attacks as a chance to change the political and individual dichotomy of us and the other, and therefore of grievable and ungrievable lives. Butler argues that the recognition of the other (Butler 34-44) could prevent further terrorist attacks and wars by pursuing the notion of a two-sided vulnerability. By using Levinas' theory of the face she shows how failed representation of and failed identification with the other can lead to experiencing it as grievable by creating a difference or a gap in the relation of it to the self, synonymously the human-being that is recognized as such, the first-personnarrative, the I or the us.Amy Waldman's novel "The Submission" and Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" treat theother in particular narrative, compositional and structural ways that create this gap. Both works areperceived as in between fiction and non-fiction and were controversially discussed, thus creating anuncertainty in readers and viewers about their expectations, and putting them into a state of agencyand action by demanding an opinion.

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