The New Millenium and the Age of Terror. Literature and the Figure in the Carpet

Abstract

The 2001 terrorist attacks on USAmarked a crucial moment in the debates referring to the provocations of the new millennium, concerning the rapport between civilizations. The characterization of our time as the age of terror reflects more than a rapport barbarism - civilization, culture - inculture, sacred - lay, a clash of ethic and religious fundamentalisms. Literally analyses, born from the ashes of the twin towers, were and are confined to look at the rapport between the Occidental and the Oriental world as one between two incompatible cultures. Their meeting, in the postcolonial and deteritorialisation epoch, is seen as one exclusively violent. But literature offers another battle field, one that proves that beyond our crushing world people, no matter what their culture is, are living the same anguishes of the meeting with the Other and feel the same threats of difference. The literary perspective, by sublimating reality, offers a fresh image of the man at the beginning of the new millennium and the enantiomorphic clash between fundamentalisms. The disease of our times, denounced by the 9/11 texts, is malign and is called over-simplification.