9/11 and the Dystopian Imaginary Towards a Periodization of Contemporary American Fiction

This paper investigates the ways in which recent American fiction has been modified by historical events, particularly 9/11/2001, in an attempt to propose a relational and workable periodization of the contemporary. More specifically, it describes the impact of such events both on the broader cultural imaginary in the US and beyond, and on generic and formal evolutions such as the prevalence of confessional narrative and the mainstreaming, on the one hand, of the literature of minorities, and, on the other, of genre fiction. Utopia and dystopia are therefore considered here not as genres, but rather as fictional modes and a structure of feeling that inform a number of contemporary texts which would not otherwise qualify as utopian or dystopian.