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.