A Study Of The Historical Writing In Terrorist

Terrorist,written by the famous contemporary American writer John Updike,is one of the representative works of post-9/11 American literature.The novel tells a story about an Egyptian American boy who converts himself from a devout Muslim to an Islamic extremist.He plans to commit suicide attacks,and then gives it up at the last minute.As an eyewitness of 9/11 Event,John Updike takes this historical event and the Iraq war as the social context of the novel and forms his historical writing with the daily life of ordinary people.He inspires readers to reflect on terrorism from the perspective of marginalized figures,revealing various problems existing in the contemporary American society.Starting with the discussion of historical consciousness reflected in Terrorist,this thesis will go further by analyzing the ways of historical writing adopted by Updike,reckoning that the author writes a history focusing on American ethnic minority groups in the modern time.New Historicism emphasizes on the interactive relationships between history and text and the interpretation and rewriting of history achieved through texts,attaching importance to "histories" overlooked by official history.Updike has gone through his formative years and reached the peak of his writing career while the concepts of New Historicism were prevalent in the academic circle.Although Updike didn’t clearly express his recognition or acceptance of New Historicism,he carried out the views on history in his works highly resembling those of New Historicism.First and foremost,the historical perceptions expressed in Terrorist,including fragmentation,subjectivity and "histories",subvert the traditional views on history which emphasizes completeness,objectivity and authority,manifesting the historical consciousness similar with that of New Historicism.Moreover,the ways of historical writing in the novel also reflect the relevant concepts of New Historicism.The author recovers the American social and historical changes within the time span of over four decades by means of "collage" of the fragments of the characters’ memories and the present.The author also takes a fictional terrorist attack as historical material to explore the unknown "truth of history".By shaping an imaginary terrorist,Updike restores a historical figure distorted by the mainstream discourse.He also tries to get a glimpse of what happened in the past in the United States through the daily-life things which are often ignored by the official history.Finally,the author attempts to reconstruct a contemporary American history with the ethnic minority groups as its main focus,which reveals the survival predicament faced by the ethnic minority and criticizes the phenomena of racial inequality in American society.The oppressed voices are released through the Islamic other and the marginalized within the American mainstream community,highlighting that historical interpretation should not be monolithic.At the same time,the author takes a cautious attitude towards the extremist violence against American hegemony,reckoning that the disadvantaged minority culture cannot really resist the impact of the powerful mainstream culture,but only to be assimilated by the latter and lose its rationality of existence.In Terrorist,the binary oppositions of history/fiction,self/other,civilized/barbarian are overthrown to some extent.Updike criticizes the mainstream ideology dominated by the white middle class in the United States,and he questions the dominant official historical discourse influenced by it with the emphasis on the diversity of historical interpretation.Therefore,his views on history are progressive,enlightening people to examine history from different perspectives,so as to understand the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the problems existing in the American society in a rational way.However,he himself cannot get rid of the influence of American mainstream ideology,and the resistance to the mainstream historical discourse is not thorough.After putting forward his historical interpretation in a different aspect,the resistant voices are restrained by the mainstream discourse.It shows his pessimistic side in terms of the historical consciousness.