Politics is (almost) personal: writing in the war on terror

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to an ongoing debate about the use of the personal and politics in post-9/11 fiction. Using the "Gray-Rothberg exchange" (Morley, 720) as a premise for its investigation, this research establishes that three narratives from post-9/11-War on Terror fiction, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Sunjeev Sahota's Ours are the Streets (2011) and Chris Morris' comedy film Four Lions (2010) have reworked the inevitability of "the personal", "emotional entanglements" of the narrative protagonist to make political critiques. These writers reverse literary focus and pay narrative attention to the personal account of a politically dehumanized figure. Discussing narrative form in Chapter 1, personal political awakening in Chapter 2 and an empathic discursive context to political discussions in Chapter 3, this work determines that the inevitability of the personal in literature can be used for constructive political treatment, but that that treatment remains in the realm of discourse as it engages with the media representations of terrorist rather than the political specifics of the ongoing global campaigns.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English