September 11, 2001 as a Cultural Trauma

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

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2. Introduction: September 11, 2001, Cultural Trauma, and Popular Culture

   • Christine Muller

   Pages 1-32

3. Popular Press Oral Histories of September 11

   • Christine Muller

   Pages 33-59

4. Limning the “Howling Space” of September 11 Through Don DeLillo’s Falling Man

   • Christine Muller

   Pages 61-93

5. The Crisis Fetish in Post-September 11 American Television

   • Christine Muller

   Pages 95-121

6. “Nothing to Do with All Your Strength”: Power, Choice, and September 11 in The Dark Knight

   • Christine Muller

   Pages 123-154

7. Zero Dark Thirty and the Fantasy of Closure

   • Christine Muller

   Pages 155-178

8. Conclusion: Cultural Trauma—September 11, 2001, and Beyond

   • Christine Muller

   Pages 179-186

9. Back Matter

   Pages 187-220

   PDF

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.

• September 11
• Trauma in American Culture
• The Dark Knight
• Don DeLillo
• Zero Dark Thirty

• Yale University, New Haven, USA

  Christine Muller

Christine Muller is Dean of Saybrook College and Lecturer in American Studies at Yale University, USA.  Her research focuses on popular culture in the first decades of the twenty-first century, particularly through the lens of post-September 11 cultural trauma in the era of the War on Terror.