“I’m Only Just Starting to Look”

Abstract

Within minutes of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, major networks began live broadcasts that captured the impact of the second plane and the collapse of both towers. Those who were not tuned in to view the events as they happened were able to watch later, as the networks continuously replayed the footage. People all over America, even New Yorkers, sat for hours staring at their television screens, attempting to comprehend what they saw. Afterward, many scholars, such as Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek, continued to focus their analysis of September 11 and its aftermath on these repeated media representations and initial reactions to them, explaining how “for us, corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots of the collapsing towers could not but be reminiscent of the most breathtaking scenes in big catastrophe productions” (Žižek, Welcome [2002] 15). Other critics, drawing on work by Cathy Caruth and Barbie Zelizer, have focused on trauma studies, suggesting that responding to the images of 9/11 allows the nation to “bear witness,” and thus to move “individuals from the personal act of ‘seeing’ to the adoption of a public stance by which they become part of a collective working through trauma together” (Zelizer 52). Both of these approaches ask Americans to reflect almost exclusively on how 9/11 has impacted the United States and its citizens, a phenomenon that has caused Richard Gray, Laura Frost, John Carlos Rowe, and others to complain that American literature about 9/11 has been too domestic (Gray 17), had an “unerring emphasis on redemption” (Frost 200), and failed to provide a way “of thinking beyond the nation” (Rowe 134).