The terrorism novel in a surrealist mode

Schoneboom, John Raymond (2018) The terrorism novel in a surrealist mode. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

The Terrorism Novel in a Surrealist Mode is a practice-led research project comprising a novel (The Science of a Single Cabbage) and an accompanying reflective commentary. The research question to which my novel responds is: Can a surrealist writing mode help expand the terrain of the literary terrorism novel? I distinguish my surrealist “mode” from historical surrealism by identifying the movement as an unfinished project survived by a certain state of mind, while acknowledging the intellectual debt by noting five central preoccupations that are common to surrealism and my project: 1) the interplay of dream-life and conscious experience; 2) playful black humour; 3) anti-fascism; 4) engagement with spectacular crime; and 5) exploitation of paranoia as both a subject and a tool for querying reality as a social and psychological construct. My thesis argues that a surrealist mode can expose and unsettle the implicit givens of what can be termed a terrorism/national security ontology, thereby contesting the assumptions that circumscribe the permissible in our age. By employing this literary mode, The Science of a Single Cabbage contributes to a disruption of terrorism narrative through a destabilising interrogation of the boundaries between the real and the unreal.

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