ABSTRACT

American cultural and political presentations of 9/11 often resort to the easily recognizable narrative convention of Bildungsroman, intensifying the nostalgia for an illusory, ideal past before the crisis. Evoking the classic novel Jane Eyre as well as the history of its reading, Patricia Park’s Re Jane and Susan Choi’s My Education disrupt the narrative scheme of initiation, destabilizing and questioning the popular way of understanding growth in connection to the experience of 9/11. Both novels’ engagement with feminist ideas enables them to stage different ways of imagining a continuation over the temporal and spatial rift that 9/11 created in American popular imagination. Furthermore, as the protagonists of the novels are presented as products of American military and political imperialism in Asia, writing their multidimensional subjectivity into being has significance for positioning America in the international world. This global feminist perspective not only retrieves complex feminist history but also introduces broader global networks within which to regard the stories of 9/11. This article examines the particular ways in which My Education and Re Jane problematize and experiment with different modes of storytelling and argues that such narrative projects have multilayered implications for narrating 9/11 today.

摘要

美国对 9/11 事件的文化和政治介绍经常诉诸易于辨认的成长小说叙事惯例，加剧了人们对危机前虚幻、理想过去的怀念。唤起经典小说《简爱》及其阅读历史，帕特里夏帕克的《再简》和苏珊蔡的《我的教育》破坏启动的叙事方案，破坏稳定和质疑与 9/11 经历相关的理解增长的流行方式。这两部小说对女权主义思想的参与使他们能够以不同的方式想象 9/11 在美国大众想象中造成的时间和空间裂痕的延续。此外，由于小说主人公被呈现为美国在亚洲的军事和政治帝国主义的产物，将他们的多维主体性写入现实对于美国在国际世界中的定位具有重要意义。这种全球女权主义视角不仅重现了复杂的女权主义历史，而且还引入了更广泛的全球网络来看待 9/11 的故事。本文考察了我的教育的具体方式和Re Jane质疑并尝试不同的讲故事模式，并认为此类叙事项目对今天的 9/11 事件具有多层次的影响。