Terrorism as an Anti-Thesis in Selected Contemporary American Novels

This book explores the idea of terrorism as represented in three contemporary American novels. Communist, religious, and environmental models of terrorism are given to account for the never-ending struggle between the strong nation-states and the marginalized groups that use terrorism as a way of resistance. Different methodologies that include cultural, civilizational, and psychoanalytical theories are used to describe the nature of terrorism in the selected novels. Don DeLillo's Mao II (1992) is used along with Jurgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere to account for the Maoist terrorism. John Updike's Terrorist (2007) is also applied to account for religious terrorism through Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. Gary Hansen's Wet Desert (2007) was finally used to approach the environmental terrorism by applying Manuel Castells' The Power of Identity.