Litera: Dil Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi

Generally, postmodernism, which roughly emerges in the 1960s and despite slowing down its effect up to the last years of the 1980s, is a stance recurring even after this period, by problematizing the economic, cultural, and political principles as well as premises of modernism. Postmodernism, which has made a profound effect in fields ranging from philosophy to architecture to technology to performing arts, has exerted its influence primarily in literature in terms of the novel genre. The postmodern novel, which draws attention through such qualities with regard to the negation of the thematic and stylistic/formal unity in contrast to the traditional novel, is incorporated by the criticism of the political economy and mostly by popular culture criticism, which turns its back on reality on the basis of fiction. Although Windows on the World, by the French novelist and critic Frédéric Beigbeder, seemingly narrates the 9/11 attacks through its nonlinear and metanarrative discourse, which indeed examines family and social structure, the effects of globalism on, individuals and an increasing discontent against the Eurocentric view with a mixture of irony. Although the demolition of the World Trade Center can be fixed to a particular time, it still preserves its effects and bears palimpsestic concerns as the event itself triggers a period marked by declaring war on war, attempting to finalize a situation by means of local or proxy groups, which they consider as a trouble for themselves, and a re-manifestation of cultural problems via their snowballing effect. Within this frame, the objective of the study is to discuss the novel Windows on the World in the context of postmodern features by including cultural criticism.