The terrorist attacks of September 11 brought the
effects of trauma home to millions in America and
throughout the world. Initially the attacks created a
sense of paralysis and a narrative void. Now we find
ourselves struggling as a nation to remember and
rebuild. The distinguished writers in Trauma at Home
confront September 11 from a variety of personal,
cultural, scholarly, and clinical perspectives. Bringing
together wide-ranging reflections on understanding,
representing, and surviving trauma, the book offers
readers an array of analyses of the overwhelming events.
Through the lenses of cultural studies, trauma studies,
feminism, film and literary criticism, psychoanalytic
theory, and through poetic and photographic images, the
contributors use their disciplines to help make sense of
the incomprehensible. These essays and reflections
address loss and examine our changed modes of
perception, relations with others, and sense of home.
Trauma at Home contains meditations on the personal and
cultural aftereffects of trauma and provides analyses of
the historical echoes of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and
Vietnam that the attacks evoked.Collectively these
essays replace the silence of shock and disbelief with
the possibility of dialogue-even as they also recognize
the impossibility of providing a single cohesive
narrative for the trauma of September 11.Judith
Greenberg has served as a visiting assistant professor
at Williams College and Dartmouth College. |
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