In the very first year of the new millennium, the world witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center, in New York City, on September 11. We all watched it numbly on television, as if it had been an action movie or an apocalyptic dystopia. This event has remained in the collective consciousness as the most tragic terrorist attack on American soil, with more than 3,000 deaths and a list of geopolitical consequences that have changed the world. Entering the area of (media) representation and fictionalisation as soon as CNN went live from the disaster scene, 9/11, "a fiction surpassing fiction" (Baudrillard 29), brought forth a very real series of military actions, an unprecedented tightening of immigration control, the surveillance under the USA PATRIOT Act, and an extreme rise of Islamophobia in the entire West. In an article entitled "Lost in the Rhetorical Fog of War," published in The Independent about a month after the event (Oct. 2001), commenting on the discourse that was trying to justify the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq-inaptly named the War on Terror-, British journalist Robert Fisk wondered, "whether we have not convinced ourselves that wars-our wars-are movies. The only Hollywood film ever made about Afghanistan was a Rambo epic in which Sylvester Stallone taught the Afghan mujaheddin how to fight the Russian occupation, helped to defeat Soviet troops and won the admiration of an Afghan boy. Are the Americans … somehow trying to actualise the movie?" (3), sending the events set in motion by the 9/11 attacks to the sphere of 'unreality' and fictionalization. This soon triggered the emergence of a literary subgenre, known as post-9/11 fiction (or simply 9/11 fiction, the prefix being deemed superfluous by some exegetes), poetry, drama, memoirs and other literary pieces. At the same, films, TV series, art installations and performances, graphic novels, comics, and other products of contemporary pop culture dealing with 9/11 and the War on Terror also proliferated. Whether they dealt with trauma, politics, conspiracy theories (further) fictionalised, or, in later years, memorialization and remembrance of the tragedy, lest we forget, the cultural products referring to these events inscribe themselves in a category akin to the 'war genre'. As academics followed suit, publishing extensively on the matter and even introducing courses on 9/11 fiction in their curricula, this panel aims to reanimate the discussion and verify whether this subgenre is still relevant for world culture two decades after the events that generated it. Consequently, we invite contributions related to cultural representations of 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror, but we will also consider comparative approaches to other 21st-century wars.

Conference presentations must be in English and will be allocated 20 minutes each, plus 10 minutes for discussion. Prospective participants are invited to submit abstracts of up to 200 words. Proposals should be in .doc or .docx format and include (within the same document): name and institutional affiliation, the title of the proposed paper, a short bio note (no more than 100 words), 5 keywords, and the participant’s e-mail address. Please submit all proposals to my address: oana.gheorghiu@ugal.ro and to the organizers' email address: conf.eng.litcult@lls.unibuc.ro.

Full details available at https://engleza.lls.unibuc.ro/aiced26_lit/