Abstract
This chapter confronts the notion of a post-September 11, 2001 “changed world” according to theoretical and methodological trajectories within both American Studies and Trauma Studies. First, I delineate these trajectories’ primary concerns with politics and representation at the time of the September 11 attacks as the conventional frameworks within which knowledge of that day and its aftermath came to be understood in the ensuing decade. I then use a popular culture approach common to these frameworks, but branch away from Freudian-based views of traumatization as an individualized experience with pathological connotations to attend to cultural trauma as an intersubjective phenomenon rooted manifestly in historical causation. Drawing on psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman’s cognitive model of psychological trauma, I define cultural trauma as a radical disruption of fundamental, culturally-generated and structured beliefs about what comprises a community’s shared worldview. In doing so, I focus on how the horrifying and widely-witnessed hijackings shattered assumptions crucial to mainstream American understandings of daily life by confounding the dominant values of optimism, self-determination, and faith in a just world. Viewing culture as a site for struggles of power, I argue that popular culture in the twenty-first century’s first decade—specifically, film and television—narratively engages with the vulnerability showcased by that day’s public deaths, primarily through a preoccupation with no-win scenarios.
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Notes
- 1.
Americanists draw on cultural studies, history, literature, media studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology…in effect, any discipline whose theoretical investments and methodological approaches can support fruitful inquiry about American culture. Terming the field an “interdiscipline” most efficiently foregrounds the interdisciplinarity at the heart of the practice of American Studies.
- 2.
The title of David W. Noble’s (2002) book, Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism, indicates confidence about this ideology’s demise.
- 3.
- 4.
Fishkin argues that “criticizing your country when you know it to be wrong is as American as Mark Twain” (2005, 19).
- 5.
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) associates a number of “trauma- and stressor-related disorders” with the aftermath of a traumatic event (2013, 265).
- 6.
The DSM-5 elaborates what such encounters and resulting disorders might include (2013, 265–290), with “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence” among the criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (271).
- 7.
I include literature within the category of popular culture in the sense that the fiction I address here is readily-available to any interested reader, rather than accessible only to an elite or specially-trained few (apart from those with literacy skills).
- 8.
See Tom Junod (2003) for a reflection on the cultural implications of witnessing those falling from the twin towers.
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Muller, C. (2019). Changed Worlds? American Studies, Trauma Studies, and September 11, 2001. In: Finney, M., Shannon, M. (eds) 9/11 and the Academy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16419-5_2
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