A research on the strategic culture and transatlantic security policies in first decade post-9/11. This thesis tries to answer the question to what extent the change in strategic culture and the...Show moreA research on the strategic culture and transatlantic security policies in first decade post-9/11. This thesis tries to answer the question to what extent the change in strategic culture and the resulting security policies of the EU and the US changed between 2002 and 2010; and how this shaped the transatlantic relationship in the post 9/11 era. The thesis concludes that there was a change in the strategic culture of the United States due to the external-shock caused by the 9/11 attacks on American soil; this shock was not experienced in the European Union. Hence, the security policies of the two powers on both sides of the Atlantic were not in line with one another in the period following 9/11. A decade later, the strategic culture of the United States shifted towards that of the European Union.Show less
Novels Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, Falling Man by Don DeLillo and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid all engage with the individual and collective traumas...Show moreNovels Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, Falling Man by Don DeLillo and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid all engage with the individual and collective traumas of 9/11. They do so in different ways and from different perspectives, but each struggles with the desire for (or impossibility of) achieving narrative closure. My thesis will use Mieke Bal’s theory linking trauma to the impossibility of closure in order to analyze the novels’ strategies to address the trauma of 9/11. I will argue that the level of healing achieved is directly related to the degree of narrative closure each novel reaches. Oskar, the child protagonist of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (year), addresses the trauma of losing his father in the attacks by going on a quest and keeping a scrapbook in which he collects his memories of his father’s life and death. This process allows him (and the novel) to achieve closure. Falling Man (year) collects the fragments of the lives of direct and indirect New York victims of the attacks, and tries to reassemble them. Here, the trauma is addressed on a more collective level than in the case of ELaIC, sometimes successfully, in other cases less so. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (year) is a novel from the other side: its speaker and main character is a Pakistani activist, whose trauma consists of his rejection by American society after 9/11. Changez and the other characters function as metaphors for the national traumas incurred. These remain unresolved and the novel accordingly does not reach narrative closure. Together, these novels suggest that individual 9/11 traumas may be worked through successfully, but that there remains an unresolved collective or even global trauma.Show less
