Blurb:

This chapter first demonstrates how Bakhtin’s concept of time and space in literature studies (1981) can be used to account for the rhetorical connections between the 11 September 2001 attacks (referred to as ‘the 9/ 11 event’) and the consequent development of ‘war on terror’ and the Iraq war. The chapter also applies Bakhtin’s concept of metamorphosis (transformation) to explain how children’s social experiences, particularly during a catastrophic event, can bring about internal transformations and transmute their concepts of an object or idea into new forms. This argument is further supported in Thibault’s work (2004) on how children use their symbolic resources to construct their social experience by reflecting on their immediate environment.