Plotting terror in fiction

Is literature dangerous?

Margaret Scanlan, professor and chair of English at IU South Bend, had no idea of the media attention to terrorism that would ensue from Sept. 11. Her book, Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction, was published by the University Press of Virginia last summer. The possibility she raises—that the fiction writer’s relationship to actual politics may be considerably reduced in the age of television and the Internet—continues to be a fascinating topic.

Scanlan traced the figure of the writer as rival, or double, to the terrorist—from origins in the romantic conviction that the writer has originality and power, to the present time, when political, social and technological developments have undermined that belief. She argues that serious writers like Friedrich Düürrenmatt, Doris Lessing and Don DeLillo imagine a contemporary writer’s encounter with terrorists as a test of the old alliance between writer and revolutionary. After considering the possibility that televised terrorism is replacing the novel, or that writing, as contemporary theory would have it, is itself a form of violence, Scanlan’s analyses explore the relationship between actual bombs and stories about bombings, between the modern world and its electronic representation, and between the exercise of political power and the fiction writer’s real power in the world.