September 11 2001 As A Cultural Trauma

Applying melancholia as an analytical concept, Christina Cavedon’s Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11 discusses novels by Jay McInerney and Don DeLillo in light of an American cultural malaise pre-dating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

This book investigates the September 11, 2001 attacks as a case study of cultural trauma, as well as how the use of widely-distributed, easily-accessible forms of popular culture can similarly focalize evaluation of other moments of acute and profoundly troubling historical change. The attacks confounded the traditionally dominant narrative of the American Dream, which has persistently and pervasively featured optimism and belief in a just world that affirms and rewards self-determination. This shattering of a worldview fundamental to mainstream experience and cultural understanding in the United States has manifested as a cultural trauma throughout popular culture in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Popular press oral histories, literary fiction, television, and film are among the multiple, ubiquitous sites evidencing preoccupations with existential crisis, vulnerability, and moral ambivalence, with fate, no-win scenarios, and anti-heroes now pervading commonly-told and readily-accessible stories. Christine Muller examines how popular culture affords sites for culturally-traumatic events to manifest and how readers, viewers, and other audiences negotiate their fallout.

This book offers an exploration of the comprehensive impact of the events of September 11, 2001, on every aspect of American culture and society. On Thanksgiving day after September 11, 2001, comic strip creators directed readers to donate money in their artwork, generating $50,000 in relief funds. The world's largest radio network, Clear Channel, sent a memo to all of its affiliated stations recommending 150 songs that should be eliminated from airplay because of assumptions that their lyrics would be perceived as offensive in light of the events of 9/11. On the first anniversary of September 11th, choirs around the world performed Mozart's Requiem at 8:46 am in each time zone, the time of the first attack on the World Trade Center. These examples are just three of the ways the world—but especially the United States—responded to the events of September 11, 2001. Each chapter in this book contains a chronological overview of the sea of changes in everyday life, literature, entertainment, news and media, and visual culture after September 11. Shorter essays focus on specific books, TV shows, songs, and films.

The 9/11 attacks brought large-scale violence into the 21st century with force and have come to epitomize the entanglement of intimate vulnerability and virtual spectacle that is typical of the globalized present. This book works at the intersection of trauma studies, affect theory, and literary studies to offer radically new interpretive frames for interrogating the challenges inherent in representing the initial moments of the terrorist encounter. Beyond the paradigm of traumatic unspeakability, post-9/11 texts expose the materiality of the human body in its universal vulnerability. The intersubjective empathy this engenders is politically subversive, as it undermines the discourse of historical singularity and exceptionalism by establishing a global network of reference and dialogue. Innovative theoretical interconnections between clinical pathology, concepts of cultural trauma, and political aesthetics lay the foundations for exploring formally and geographically diverse texts. Close readings of works by Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, Don DeLillo, and William Gibson map the relationship between representations of 9/11 and complex aspects of trauma theory. This detailed approach makes a case for revisiting trauma theory and bringing its Freudian origins into the digitized present. It showcases trauma as a physical and psychological wound as well as an experience that is simultaneously pre-discursive and inhibited by the virtuality of the present-day real. Exploring how contemporary trauma studies can take into account the digitization and virtuality of present-day realities, this book is a key intervention in establishing a contemporary ethics of witnessing terror.

It is all but impossible to think of September 11th 2001 and not, at the same time, recall an image. The overwhelmingly visual coverage in the world's media pictured a spectacle of terror, from images of the collapsing towers, to injured victims and fatigued firefighters. In the days, weeks and months that followed, this vast collection of photographs continued to circulate relentlessly. This book investigates the psychological impact of those photographs on a stunned American audience. Drawing on trauma theory, this book asks whether the prolonged exposure of audience to photographs was cathartic or damaging. It explores how first the collective memory of the event was established in the American psyche and then argues that through repetitive use of the most powerful pictures, the culture industry created a dangerously simple 9/11 metanarrative. At the same time, people began to reclaim and use photography to process their own feelings, most significantly in 'communities' of photographic memorial websites. Such exercises were widely perceived as democratic and an aid to recovery. This book interrogates that assumption, providing a new understanding of how audiences see and process news photography in times of crisis.

Marcus Caldwell, and English widower and Muslim convert, lives in an old perfume factory in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan. Lara, a Russian woman, arrives at his home one day in search of her brother, a Soviet soldier who disappeared in the area many years previously, and who may have known Marcus’s daughter. In the days that follow, further people arrive there, each seeking someone or something. The stories and histories that unfold, interweaving and overlapping, span nearly a quarter of a century and tell of the terrible afflictions that have plagued Afghanistan—as well of the love that can blossom during war and conflict.

Transatlantic Literature and Culture After 9/11 asks whether post-9/11 America has chosen the 'wrong side of paradise' by waging war on terror rather than working for global peace. Analyzing transatlantic literature and culture, the book refocuses our view of Ground Zero through the lenses of imperial power and cosmopolitan exchange.

The Oklahoma City bombing, intentional crashing of airliners on September 11, 2001, and anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001 have made Americans acutely aware of the impacts of terrorism. These events and continued threats of terrorism have raised questions about the impact on the psychological health of the nation and how well the public health infrastructure is able to meet the psychological needs that will likely result. Preparing for the Psychological Consequences of Terrorism highlights some of the critical issues in responding to the psychological needs that result from terrorism and provides possible options for intervention. The committee offers an example for a public health strategy that may serve as a base from which plans to prevent and respond to the psychological consequences of a variety of terrorism events can be formulated. The report includes recommendations for the training and education of service providers, ensuring appropriate guidelines for the protection of service providers, and developing public health surveillance for preevent, event, and postevent factors related to psychological consequences.