The attacks on 11 September 2001 encapsulated the ways in which pain and spectacle are entangled in the globalized present. Two new publications respond to these challenges, and aim to resituate the moment of 9/11 within broader conceptual and historical frameworks. Ruth Mackay's monograph Waiting for the Sky to Fall: The Age of Verticality in American Narrative and Catherine Morley's edited volume 9/11: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature offer useful perspectives on the literary tropes developed by writers to respond to the experience of terrorism. Both demonstrate the strength of detailed textual work in this field, engaging closely with a wide variety of texts in insightful and critical readings.

Morley's introduction to 9/11: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature offers an evocative frame for the chapters to follow; she explores how the postapocalyptic imagination of the city both before and after 9/11 can provide an entryway into reevaluating the 9/11 attacks. Morley thus proposes to move away from a discourse of singularity and exceptionalism, aiming instead to place, as she puts it, “post-9/11 fiction in a broader intellectual, cultural, literary and ideological context” (14). This not only aligns the volume with a recent critical tendency to approach 9/11 in transatlantic and transhistorical contexts, but also does so very successfully. It also makes the well-rehearsed claim that 9/11 literature domesticated the attacks – a key point of contention throughout the chapters assembled here, engaging with the relation between the private and the political in the aftermath of terror in critical and multifaceted ways.Footnote ¹ While this collection has no explicit link to trauma theory, therefore, most authors share related interests in processes of remembering and grieving, and in the limits and potentials of the literary imagination to approach an experience that seemed, initially, at the limits of language itself.

The question if, and how, the realm of the political enters into the personalized fictions of 9/11 thus sparks the main debate in which the authors assembled in this volume engage. Debra Shostak's comparative reading of two post-9/11 novels narrated through the eyes of a child, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2002) and Philip Roth's The Plot against America (2004), expands Charles Lewis's concept of “prosthetic fiction” to explore the strategies of survival and emplotment in both texts.Footnote ² Her conclusion that the domestic indeed outweighs the larger discursive and transnational potential inherent in both novels convinces especially in the case of Foer's work. Sien Uytterschout's and Kristiaan Verluys's approach offers a fascinating counterperspective on the same question, demonstrating how essays in this volume are selected to illuminate the critical complexity of the field. In what might be the stand-out contribution of the volume, particularly where conceptual depth is concerned, they propose to use Jean-François Lyotard's distinction between grands and petits récits to read Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall (2005) and Paul Auster's Man in the Dark (2008). This innovative take on the ambivalence of language and narration in personal memory and history is the foundation for a detailed argument about the intersections of public and private grief. Their conclusion, that these seemingly domestic texts are politically and ethically engaged because they throw the role of language and narrative into relief in both a broader geopolitical and a personalized context, gets to the heart not only of the texts at hand, but also of most other 9/11 texts discussed in this volume as well.

Interested in the borderlines of trauma and mediation, David Brauner and Aimee Pozorski ask how specific genres offer platforms to gauge, on the one hand, how the individual writer is connected to the historic event, and on the other hand to enquire into the relations between the 9/11 moment and the temporalities of past and futurity. Brauner's work with comics and Pozorski's interest in digital poetry exemplify the diversity of text types acknowledged in this volume. Both emphasize the role of the writer or artist, enquiring how artistic literary work is a way to reposition the individual in relation to history. The complex strategies of mediation and ironic distance of the protagonist which Brauner succinctly observes in a wide canon of comic books, of which Art Spiegelman's work is only the best known, is a seeming opposite to Pozorski's description of a community of poets engaged in the collaborative art of rebuilding the Twin Towers in verse. While Pozorski could expand on the difference between rebuilding, with its thrust into the past, and the futurity she emphasizes, both essays demonstrate that the trope of the tower continues to crystallize the ethics of the cultural work in which writers are engaged.

This capacity of art to confront death, however, is contested in the aftermath of trauma; Hamilton Carroll's discussion of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin (2009) and the editor Catherine Morley's own contribution, on the architecture of memorialization in Amy Waldman's The Submission (2011), thematize the role of public art in remembering loss. Through the lenses of Philippe Petit's spectacular high-wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, and the fraught politics of public memorials, they thematize the fault line of public and private grief itself.

The contributions by Aaron de Rosa, Paul Jenner and Mark Eaton expand this political dimension. In chapters on the time of capital consumerism in Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2009), questions of political complicity in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010), and the sociology of radicalization in John Updike's Terrorist (2006), these authors most directly address the critical thrust that emanates from 9/11 fiction, which, after all, is far from a domesticated canon. It is in these three contributions that this volume of well-selected and varied work begins to open into a more interdisciplinary kaleidoscope of the field of 9/11 studies.

Yet the strength of the volume, to unite diverse essays on textual cultures ranging from digital poetry to comics around the joint concern with the nodes of private and public experience, nevertheless means that there is little in-depth engagement with a broader range of topics that have emerged in 9/11 studies. The role of discursive or biopolitical power in the aftermath of the attacks comes to mind here, along with the dimension of virtuality and the digital in perceiving terror, an ethical perspective on grievability, or indeed on the heated questions of race and ethnicity after the attacks. Because of the survey style of the collection as a whole, it would have been particularly interesting to see how 9/11 texts by minority writers such as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni or Laila Halaby can expand the critical focus.

Where Morley's 9/11: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature adopts a synchronic approach, Ruth Mackay's Waiting for the Sky to Fall uses the trope of verticality to integrate 9/11 diachronically. She traces clusters of vertical events throughout the long twentieth century, reading texts as diverse as Winsor McCay's Little Nemo (1905–26), Upton Sinclair's Oil! (1927) and Allen Ginsberg's poetry on the space race with and against each other. Key to her argument is the link between spatiality and affective experience; she defines verticality to denote an inherently ambivalent experience, a tipping point between trepidation and wonder, imminent disaster and anticipation. When she thus proposes that verticality links the anxieties surrounding 9/11 to a series of vertical moments since the onset of modernity, her concept of verticality emerges not as a primarily architectural trope, but as a mode of experience located in the node of the sublime and the traumatic. Mackay's approach thus proves as fruitful as it is innovative to the 9/11 moment. While it might be argued that her readings revolve around a sense more of vertigo than of verticality itself, which she shortly touches upon in her introductory theoretical outline, this does not in any way limit the potential of her approach to bring together a new canon of texts in a topical literary genealogy of 9/11.

As in Morley's volume, detailed textual readings are at the heart of Mackay's enquiry. She uses the trope of verticality to interrogate a series of topics developed in close dialogue with the texts she studies, such as the psychoanalytical revolution in notions of selfhood and subjectivity in her first chapter on Winsor McCay's cartoons. Because the theme of the vertical translates so succinctly onto the architecture of McCay's cartoon panels, this is a well-chosen entry into the volume, and demonstrates her ambition to portray the vertical as a crisis point of epistemological certainties. The vertical thus becomes a linkage between the personal and the public, a theme shared with Morley's volume on 9/11. This is not always ethically unproblematic, as the question of racial stereotyping in these cartoons shows. Mackay argues that verticality works as a “repressed desire to fix the racial Other in a stereotype” (60) which is then destabilized. This is backed up in a thoughtful and close reading, even if it never quite disperses the suspicion that McCay might be portraying the racial other as a destructive force in a much more problematic way than Mackay allows.

The main theme of this book, though, is the relation between violence and awe, and all chapters that follow offer insightful analyses of this ambivalence in a series of varied readings. Mackay thus expands the complex concepts she evokes in the introduction, but initially discusses only very briefly, which is especially important in the case of the generally fraught relation between destruction and the sublime. This forms the core of her chapters on oil drilling and on Ginsberg's “nuclear poetics” (147). Not only does Upton Sinclair's Oil! provide the most convincing case for another key argument of this survey, that the horizontal frontier was pushed into the vertical realm of derricks and drilling after its closure; Mackay's discussion of how risk plays into the phallic pleasure of the erection of oil derricks also provides an innovative perspective in evaluating the impact of capitalism.

Vertical imagery here is understood as an interrogative gesture rather than a phenomenon to be fixed and defined, as becomes obvious when reading the chapters just mentioned against the fantasies of liberation that are attached to the vertical in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). The inclusion of Silko's text widens the cultural frame of notions of spatiality in very productive ways, yet it also points to the multivalence of the vertical. Mackay is most interested in the vertical as an idea of liberation, escaping the curtailments of freedom emanating from the (horizontal) setup of borderlines. While this convinces in the case of fantasies of flight in these texts, it is not always clear how the “vertically realized world free from restraint” (145) relates to the mines, skyscrapers, and “highs” from drug addiction.

All in all, this provides a fascinating and innovative intertextual network for 9/11 literature and culture. Mackay uses James Marsh's documentary Man on Wire (2008) to address the moment of 9/11 through the retrospective lens of Philippe Petit's 1974 high-wire walk. This further enhances the variety of this book's canon, and her discussion of the anticipation of the fall encapsulates a key moment of trauma of the 9/11 attacks. Her argument that Petit's walk functioned as palliative to 9/11 is developed in a detailed analysis of how the movie entwines Petit's rise to the top of the Twin Towers with a heist narrative, lifting him above authority. This adds another dimension to the question how risk is entangled with (literal and metaphoric) flight. If one wanted to nitpick, it is somewhat surprising that, considering the topics touched upon in earlier chapters, this is the ethical instance of which Mackay seems most unforgiving. Yet it is a fitting endpoint to an overall inspiring perspective on the prefiguration of 9/11 in twentieth-century literature.

Thus Ruth Mackay and Catherine Morley offer complementary perspectives on 9/11. Mackay provides a fresh conceptual lens through which to approach the attacks – vertically through time – and opens a new platform for discussing the many dimensions of the ethical ambivalence of the sublime, in 2001 and beyond. The authors in Morley's volume survey and expand the existent research corpus on the relation between the personal and public spheres in the aftermath of terror, in compelling close readings of key texts that prove the variety of the field.