The Falling of Super/Man: The Myth and the Collapse of the American Superhero in Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World

Abstract

Published in 2003, the French writer Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World is composed of a fictional story and the author’s occasional autoficitonal accounts. The novel has two narrators, one of them is Beigbeder, named after the author himself, and the other is Carthew Yorston (and sometimes his two sons, Jerry and David, in a few chapters). In the fictional story, Beigbeder vividly depicts the situation in the restaurant Windows on the World before and after the two hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center. Interestingly, during the time of emergency, David keeps on imagining Carthew as a superhero who may ultimately reveal his identity to protect all of the people under the attack. The superhero thus becomes an important motif in the fictional story and also a departure point from which the author’s autofiction reflects upon and criticizes the domestic and foreign policies of the US before and after 9/11. Introduction traces the history of the superhero genre in the United States in order to distinguish the relationship between the superhero genre and the historical events in the US. In Chapter One, I situate the fictional story within the traditional superhero genre to see how Beigbeder characterizes the American ideology of the country as the superpower through the image of the superhero. Given the issues of trauma and the theme of good versus evil in the superhero genre, Chapter Two discusses how the fictional story corresponds to the real political situation in the US after 9/11. Furthermore, in Chapter Three, by examining the representation of the superhero’s death and the mourning for the falling of the superhero in Windows on the World, I argue that Beigbeder challenges the illusion of the superhero and returns to the recognition of human vulnerability. The conclusion restates my arguments and affirms Beigbeder’s treatment of the superhero’s falling, which focuses on the ethics of mutual respect and provides another perspective from which to create post-9/11 literature.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	English
Supervisor	Pei-Chen Liao (Supervisor)