Did you enjoy your weekend? Revisit it with a look at our weekend Rumpus features.
Didn’t enjoy your weekend? We have just the thing to cheer you up: weekend Rumpus features.
First, we have a Saturday Rumpus essay on the link between 9/11 and gender and fabulist fiction. Here’s a nice juicy chunk to get you started:
My own creative writing students at UC Santa Cruz didn’t write about The World Trade Center or the war on terror, but more of them started writing about zombies, apocalypses, zombie apocalypses, fantasies about wars between good and evil, anxious stories about our threatened world and the dangers of the enemy within. Then, a few years after 9/11, I began noticing that many of myundergrads had started referring to themselves as “girls” instead of “women”; some began to dress like little girls as well, in high-knee socks and short skirts.
Then, writer, traveler, and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Aleksandar Hemon talks about the effect of culture shock and politics on his work:
When [Professor Koljevic] was a teacher, he was apolitical. His approach was that we were all doing what we were doing in a safe zone, safe from politics and the various ugly things that were available at the time. I thought of it as ennobling, as in, If I keep learning this, I’ll be safe from all the shit, but it turned out he was a spy in that safe zone all along. Or at least the way he thought and talked about it did not in any way prevent his becoming a fascist. And then what is the purpose of it at all?
