Product Description

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.

Contributors: Elizabeth Baer, Donna Bassin, Jill Bennett, James Berger, Peter Brooks, Ann Cvetkovich, Suheir Hammad, Geoffrey Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Irene Kacandes, Claire Kahane, E. Ann Kaplan, Dori Laub, Orly Lubin, Nancy K. Miller, Toni Morrison, Lorie Novak, Susannah Radstone, Michael Rothberg, Richard Stamelman, Patricia Yaeger, and James Young.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #614897 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 227 pages

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Startling, Honest Reflections
Trauma at Home is the most thoughtful collection of responses to September 11th I have seen. Every essay is a reminder of what I think we've begun to forget, as individuals and a nation: how the event startled us out of our ordinary methods of understanding and acting in the world. The book begins with Toni Morrison's elegy, 'The Dead of September 11': 'But I would not say a word until I could set aside all I know or believe about nations, wars, leaders, the governed and ungovernable.' Judith Greenberg has collected a remarkable number of essays that find their authors in the process of figuring out how to think once they've been startled out of all they know or believe.

A different, compelling and intelligent book on 9/11
So much of the analysis about September 11 is trite and packaged that I found this book especially refreshing. You have leading academics, writers, pyschoanalysts and others probing beneath the easy conclusions to offer real insight about 9/11. Greenberg's own essay is one of the best, but you will also learn and benefit from many, many others.