Nineteenth-century anarchists emphasized the rhetorical component of terrorism by calling it “propaganda by deed,” and since then many journalists and historians have pointed out that narrative is essential to terrorism. Literary critics, however, have been less willing to grant literature a role in explaining terrorism. One reason for this reluctance is that most novels focus on victims of terrorism rather than perpetrators. Another reason is the influence of critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Critics who write about terrorism and literature usually discuss the aesthetic problem of representing shocking violence rather than the practical problem of preventing it. Recent developments in literary criticism as well as in Terrorism Studies, however, suggest that literary critics may be able to join social scientists in the interdisciplinary field of Terrorism Studies.

In literary criticism, postcritique has shifted attention from the ways texts conceal ideology to the ways texts can intervene in the world. In Critique and Postcritique Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski argue that the suspicious readings of critique prevent literature from affirming anything. In The Uses of Literature Felski argues that most academics treat literary texts as objects of knowledge rather than sources of knowledge, whereas ordinary readers value literature because it provides worldly knowledge. As Felski states in “Postcritical Reading,” it is time to emphasize the “uses of literature—what literature does in the world." By asking how literature functions in the world, postcritique encourages us to use the information literature contains.

The field of Terrorism Studies is also changing, but in the opposite direction. Just when postcritique started to question the value of critique, the subfield of Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) emerged. It adopted critique to challenge the assumptions of “orthodox,” empirical studies. Applying the ontological and epistemological assumptions of critique, scholars in CTS question media accounts of political violence. These scholars argue that policing authorities overlook fundamental questions about how terrorism is defined, who is empowered to define it, and what methods should be used to combat it.

The simultaneous emergence of postcritique and Critical Terrorism Studies in the last decade makes this panel timely. One of the major findings of social scientists in Terrorism Studies is that there is no such thing as a terrorist personality. Since terrorists are indistinguishable from the rest of the population until they turn to violence, attempts to develop profiles divert resources from effective strategies. Nevertheless, the public continues to regard terrorists as fanatics and to demand psychological and demographic profiles of likely terrorists. Postcritique encourages us to ask whether novels about terrorists corroborate this finding. If fiction is consistent with this finding, it can provide further evidence and can help overcome popular misconceptions.

All four panelists have already published on the topic of terrorism and literature. For this panel, they take a postcritical perspective, and their papers on diverse texts illustrate literature's capacity to intervene in the world.

Joyce Wexler focuses on the convergence of social science research and postcritique in relation to the early twentieth-century bombing in Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Reading the novel in relation to this research, she argues that the information about terrorism in the novel is useful. Conrad and social scientists alike show that terrorists are not abnormal or insane; particular social and personal factors lead people to violence. The novel drives home social science findings that the public continues to resist.

David Mulry examines varieties of terrorism in the 1890s. In News from Nowhere, William Morris, a British socialist and editor of the radical journal, Commonweal, offered a dreamlike vision of the future as an ideal anarchist utopia. In Caesar’s Column, Edmond Boisgilbert M.D. (the pseudonym of Ignatius Donnelly, an American populist politician) offered a grim, contrasting view of chaos and decline after a global class revolution. Each fictional vision is a reaction to shared anxieties that drove a great creative burst of popular fiction of agitation, revolt, and terrorism. Novels and short stories inspired by the dashed promises of the Paris Commune, the nationalist aspirations of Fenian revolutionaries, displaced Nihilists in the Russian struggle against the despotism of Czarist Russia, and the emergent anarchist and collectivist social revolutionaries in the nascent labor movement offer us a context to understand, to come to terms with, and perhaps a way to navigate, the complexities of the modern world, and the agitation and terror that we experience today as a distinctly 21st century problem.

Margaret Scanlan examines IRA terrorism in the 1970s. In Say Nothing (2019), his account of a 1972 Belfast murder, Patrick Keefe notes an IRA member’s admiration for Mao’s adage: “the guerilla . . . must swim among the people as a fish swims through the sea.” Terrorists always need a silent, cooperative populace, but what turns a neighborhood into their sea? How does a working-class woman come of age in a terrorized and terrorizing community? Anna Burns’ Booker-Award winning Milkman (2018) provides a complex answer stemming from firsthand experience, affirming the novel as a source of knowledge about terrorism and language as a means of recovery from violence.

Roy Scranton considers ecoterrorism in relation to the real-life case of Theodore Kaczynski and novels about eco-terrorism. The writings of Theodore Kaczynski are often considered the lurid ranting of an unhinged psychopath, yet as the world careens toward self-destruction from anthropogenic global warming, it’s hard to argue with the opening sentence of his 1995 manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future”: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” What about Kaczynski’s writing was so compelling to Paul Kingsnorth, the British novelist and essayist best known for founding the apocalyptic quietist movement Dark Mountain? Is it merely his revolutionary message? Or is there an aesthetic component to his work? This question might be illuminated by looking at a case where nearly the opposite happened: the role Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang played in inspiring the founding of Earth First!, an environmental organization committed to direct action, considered by many to be an eco-terrorist organization.