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.

In Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11, Christina Cavedon frames her examination of 9/11 fiction, especially Jay McInerney’s The Good Life and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, with a thorough discussion of what US reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 disclose about American culture. Offering a comparative reading of pre- and post-9/11 literary, public, and academic discourses, she deconstructs the still commonly held belief that cultural repercussions of the attacks primarily testify to a cultural trauma in the wake of the collectively witnessed media event. She innovatively re-interprets discourses to be symptomatic of a malaise which had afflicted American culture already prior to 9/11 and can best be approached with melancholia as an analytical concept.

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.

In recent decades, science fiction in both print and visual media has produced an outpouring of story lines that feature forms of simulated reality. These depictions appear with such frequency that fictional portrayals of simulated worlds have become a popular sci-fi trope--one that prompts timeless questions about the nature of reality while also tapping into contemporary debates about emerging technologies. In combination with tech-driven tensions, this study shows that our collective sense of living in politically uncertain times also propels the popularity of these story lines. Because of the kinds of questions they raise and the cultural anxieties they provoke, these fictional representations provide a window into contemporary culture and demonstrate how we are reassessing our own reality.

As people migrate, they face the need to create a stable space within a disconcertingly unfamiliar environment. This experience of creating new spaces opens opportunities for positive transcultural connections; however, these opportunities can also serve as the disciplining of the migrant body. This text focuses on the movement of bodies in transnational communities and the formation of domestic and communal spaces that provide respite from migratory paths, negotiate transnational relationships, or establish a new home. In doing so, we explore literary texts that question, challenge, and deepen our understanding of the experience of migration through the use of space and place. The texts in question examine three levels of transnational spaces: intimate spaces such as family, personal growth, or sexuality; inherited spaces reflected in generational conflicts, religious identity, and inherited histories; and national spaces that look at issues of broader national identities. The texts we examine engage with transnational communities within the United States, and the ways in which narratives reimagine new space to negotiate change and create new norms. These narratives can sometimes bridge both cultures or can sometimes result in a violent sense of displacement. Each chapter problematizes a different aspect of transcultural adaptation, and the geographic ties of each community focus reflect the multicultural reality of the U.S., with connections to Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Looking at examples including picture books, young adult novels, and DC Comics, Lampert explores ethnic, national, and heroic identities in this pioneering and timely book that examines the ways in which cultural identities are constructed within young adult and children’s literature about the attacks of September 11, 2001.

This book explores the impact of September 11, 2001 upon interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy in the liberal arts. Since “the day that changed everything”, many forces have transformed institutions of higher education in the United States and around the world. The editors and contributors consider the extent to which the influence of 9/11 was direct, or part of wider structural changes within academia, and the chapters represent a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives on how the production and dissemination of knowledge has changed since 2001. Some authors demonstrate that new forms of inquiry, exploration, and evidence have been created, much of it focused on the causes, consequences, and meanings of the terror attacks. Others find that scholars sought to understand 9/11 by applying old theoretical and empirical insights and reviving lines of questioning that have become relevant. The contributors also examine the impact of 9/11 on higher education administration and liberal arts pedagogies. Among the many collective findings is that scholars in the humanities and critical social sciences have been most attentive to the place of 9/11 in society and academic culture. This eclectic collection will appeal to students and scholars interested in the place of the liberal arts in the twenty-first century world.

This book critically examines the institutional curation of traumatic memory at the 9/11 Memorial Museum and its evocative power as a cultural storyteller. Memorial Museums are evocative spaces. Drawing on aesthetic practices deeply rooted in representing the ‘unrepresentability’ of cultural trauma, most notably the Holocaust, Memorial Museums are powerful, popular mediums for establishing cultural values, asking the visitor to contemplate "Who am I?" in relation to the difficult histories on display. Using primary data, this book poses important questions about the emotionally-charged site: what ‘moral lessons’ are visitors imparted with at the 9/11 Memorial Museum? Who is the cultural institution’s primary audience—the imagined community it reconstructs this traumatic history and safeguards its memories for? What does the National September 11 Memorial & Museum ultimately teach visitors about history, ourselves, and others? This work will be of interest to students and scholars in the areas of Human Geography, American Studies, Museum Studies and Public History, Cultural and Heritage Studies, and Trauma and Memory Studies.