CULTURAL TRAUMA and SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 Christine
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: THE WORLD IS OLD AND NEW AGAIN: CULTURAL TRAUMA AND SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 Christine Marie Muller, Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Dissertation directed by: Professor John Caughey Department of American Studies This dissertation explores the emergent cultural aftereffects of September 11, 2001. I consider how popular US narratives from the decade following that day’s events evidence an ongoing, pervasive struggle with certain of the hijackings’ especially troubling features, manifesting September 11 as a cultural trauma. I distinguish cultural trauma as an intersubjective phenomenon from psychological trauma and its individualized emphasis. I also distinguish my approach from the dominant ways historical, cultural and literary studies have typically conceptualized trauma as a primarily Freudian-theorized, pathological reaction to extreme happenings. Rather, drawing on Janoff-Bulman’s shattered assumptions model of psychological trauma, I define cultural trauma as a radical disruption of basic, common, taken-for-granted, culturally-generated and -structured beliefs about what constitutes a community’s ordinary life. I focus on how the hijackings’ shocking and well-publicized developments shattered assumptions fundamental to mainstream American understandings of daily life. To trace these shattered assumptions, I review ten popular culture texts: three popular press oral history collections – the 2002 September 11: An Oral History, the 2002 Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, and the 2007 Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/11 – as well as the 2002 Frontline documentary “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero;” the 2003 Tom Junod Esquire article “The Falling Man;” the mid-to-late-2000s television series Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and FlashForward; the 2008 Christopher Nolan film The Dark Knight; and the 2007 Don DeLillo novel Falling Man. By assessing and comparing these texts’ primary thematic concerns, I outline how each narrative, situated in varying media and genres, engages vulnerability in the forms of existential insecurity and the troubling of meaningful and ethical choice, exposing fragmented foundational beliefs in the wake of September 11. However, instead of reconstructing these fragmented pieces into an unequivocal new whole, these texts ambivalently instantiate that day’s unresolved cultural fallout, serving to document the still evolving structures of feeling constituting this cultural trauma. Accordingly, this study evidences how popular culture serves as a site for recognizing and negotiating September 11 as a cultural trauma while suggesting how cultural trauma might be recognized and negotiated at other times of stark cultural change. THE WORLD IS OLD AND NEW AGAIN: CULTURAL TRAUMA AND SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 by Christine Marie Muller Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2011 Advisory Committee: Professor John Caughey, Chair Professor Patricia Hill Collins Professor Francine Hultgren Professor Sheila Jelen Professor Psyche Williams-Forson ©Copyright by Christine Marie Muller 2011 ii PREFACE “Where were you on September 11?” Ask this question, and unless those whom you ask were very young at the time, you likely will receive detailed answers. People will tell you where they were and what they were doing on that day in the year 2001, regardless of how far removed they were from any crash site. This question has arisen consistently whenever I mention my research in conversation, helping me to cultivate a rich and dynamic sense of the shared yet individualized impact of September 11. This curious coupling of apparent distance from an event with a sense of deep involvement also characterizes how my own personal interests relate to this intellectual inquiry. On September 11, 2001, I was twenty-six years old and on vacation in Rome, Italy with my immediate family: my parents and my two older brothers. In the late 1950s, my father had left West Germany while it was still rebuilding from World War II. My maternal grandparents had emigrated from Italy after World War I and the flu pandemic that plagued the beginning of the twentieth century. After avoiding airplanes for forty years from fear of flying, my mother had finally agreed to a second visit to the country where she traced her roots. Together, we enjoyed the middle class benefits of international tourism in relative comfort and safety, benefits my grandparents’ interwar and father’s post-war immigration to the US had made possible. This personal presumption of security and autonomy, of a separation from past global upheavals, poverty in foreign lands, and the dependence on forces beyond ourselves that such conditions unveil, echoes the dominant narrative so central to American culture’s tenacious – however often belied – portrait of itself: the “American iii Dream.” With my intimate identification with such a narrative, I nevertheless witnessed its graphic violation from afar, by watching CNN and BBC international news coverage of September 11 on a television in an Italian hotel room. Circumstance had positioned me on September 7 to leave the US as a nation considered at peace and re-enter it on September 17 as a state readying for war, highlighting the swift, drastic, confounding changes that explicitly challenged the dominant narrative of the “American Dream” and portended what at the time seemed to be possibly irrevocable alterations to daily life in the United States. When flying back to Philadelphia on September 17, I tried to stay calm in the frantic European airports and suppressed in-flight inklings of doom at the imagined prospect of a bomb explosion. I was not a victim of September 11, but I felt that I could – like anyone else – by happenstance be the unsuspecting victim of whatever might come next. Afterward, I could remember exactly where I was and what I was doing on September 11, 2001, and others could as well. As time moved forward, I began to wonder in increasingly critical ways what it might mean to be simultaneously detached from and invested in this event – one that, by some accounts, changed very little, and by others, might even have “changed the world.” iv DEDICATION This project explores the cultural aftereffects of a large-scale crisis throughout a large and diverse population from the premised question: has the world changed as a result of September 11, 2001? If so, how, and for whom? However, my research on these terms recognizes that for many, there is no question of a changed world. I write this dedication in honor of Salvatore Zisa and the 2,995 others who were killed that day, those who survived, and their loved ones, for whom the world has not been the same since. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following journals and collections for publishing portions of this dissertation and for permitting their inclusion in this project: Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture; Historia Actual Online; McFarland & Company, Inc.’s The 21st Century Superhero: Essays on Gender, Genre and Globalization in Film; Fairleigh Dickinson University Press’s The War on Terror and American Popular Culture: September 11 and Beyond; Greenwood Press’s September 11 in Popular Culture: A Guide; and Brown Walker Press’s Engaging Terror: A Critical and Interdisciplinary Approach. Full citations are footnoted within the text and listed on the Works Consulted page. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue: September 11, 2001 ........................................................................................... 1 Introduction, Literature Reviews, and Methodological Overview: Trauma, Culture and September 11, 2001 ............................................................................................................. 7 Figuring a Day and Its Aftereffects ................................................................................ 7 Psychological Trauma: An Introduction to Its Critical Features ................................. 13 American Studies, Power and Knowledge: A Review of the Literature ..................... 22 Cultural Trauma: A Review of the Literature .............................................................. 27 Cultural Trauma and September 11: A Review of the Literature ................................ 38 Methodology: September 11, Narrative, and Culture .................................................. 46 Chapter One: Lost and Found Selves and Worlds in Popular Press Oral Histories of September 11 ..................................................................................................................... 58 Introduction: Individuals and Their Communities under Conditions of Terror .......... 58 Trauma and Narrative: Piecing Together Fragmented Knowledge and Power ........... 60 Joining Selves and Worlds through Oral History ......................................................... 69 “We Are All Americans”? Individuals and Communities in the Wake of September 11 ....................................................................................................................................... 72 History as Confusion, Vulnerability and Doubt ........................................................... 83 Conclusion: Selves, Communities, and Action after September 11 ............................ 91 Chapter Two: Witnessing the Fall: September 11 and the Crisis of the Permeable Self 94 Introduction: The Crisis of the Permeable Self ...........................................................