Dr Sheheryar B. Sheikh introduces the bookclub
In December 2001, two months after the terrorist attack on the United States, the American novelist Don DeLillo urged American writers to create “the counternarrative” that would reclaim control of culture in a call for nation-rebuilding fiction. This rallying call echoes John William de Forest’s original post-Civil War coinage of the term and concept of the “Great American Novel.” But whereas the original focus of criticism for the so-called Great American Novels was the American Dream, in the post-9/11 era the writers playing into the tropes of the concept are dealing almost exclusively with one issue: the place of Muslims and Islam in the developed world.
In his book, The Post-9/11 Great American Novel, Sheheryar B. Sheikh re-examines four seminal novels written after and about the terrorist attack. By analyzing the mechanisms repression, appropriation, adversarial othering, and enforced secularization as they appear in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, John Updike’s Terrorist, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Amy Waldman’s The Submission, this study shows the iterations of “solutions” and the abandonment of the “American” ideals by traumatized white liberals.
For the Muslim Institute Dr. Sheikh will conducts three online book club sessions to discuss these books and the ideas and literary and real world implications that flow from them.
Each session will be 75 minutes long, with the first minutes allocated to Dr. Sheikh explaining the relevant chapter’s structure and scope, and the second half devoted to discussion and Q&A.
Each person who signs up will have access to The Post-9/11 Great American Novel: Fictional Perpetuations of White American Trauma and Islamophobia by Sheheryar B. Sheikh.
Note: The monograph’s electronic copy is being provided for fair use and no-distribution to attendees of this book club. While it is not necessary to read the four novels being analyzed (adequate summaries are provided in the monograph), it will add dimensions to the discussion if participants have read the works.
The Sessions:
Wednesday 25th March 2026 7pm GMT. Introduction: Dr. Sheikh provides a brief talk on the introduction of his monograph, focusing on the concepts of the “Great American Novel” and what he has termed “the Muslim Question”.
Session 1: Introduction: The Great American Novel & ‘The Muslim Question’
Wednesday 8th April 2026 7pm BST. The second session focuses on an examination of repression found in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and the second is a study of appropriations and textual seizures in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man.
Session 2: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close & Falling Man
Wednesday 29th April 2026 7pm BST. Final session: The last session examines John Updike’s Terrorist and Amy Waldman’s The Submission. To conclude, we examine trends in post-9/11 literature that has been produced since the first-decade novels and the implications of fictional discourse produced by European, non-white American, and Muslim voices have contributed to the discourse in meaningful ways.
Session 3: Terrorist and the Submission
Sheheryar Sheikh is a 2023 PhD graduate from the University of Saskatchewan. He has published two acclaimed novels with HarperCollins India. He is currently a Donald Hill Family Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS, where he is working on several projects, including a third novel on father-son relationships, a set of short stories about immigrant women, and a world-building set of novellas, short stories, and vignettes set in an ecumenopolis or world-city set five hundred years from now. And he is presenting with this book club series his just-published monograph, The Post-9/11 Great American Novel (Bloomsbury Academic 2025).
Dr Sheheryar Sheikh
