Trauma at Home: After 9-11 by Judith Greenberg (Editor)

Product Details

Synopsis

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.

KLIATT

Greenberg has collected writings of persons who experienced losses or who were intimately involved in some way with the 9/11 attacks. Acknowledging that all was still in process, she asked them to work through their powerful emotions as they tried to give meaning to this traumatic invasion of their "home." This is a quickly put-together, interim book written during the six months following the attack. Greenburg had written about trauma; she had the assistance and encouragement of a friend and mentor, Marianne Hirsch, and her psychoanalyst mother and philosopher father. She has divided the essays into sections: Impact, Reporting, Photography, Imagining, Echoing, and Working Through. These are essays, most six to nine pages long, by highly educated, reflective New Yorkers. They are not easy-reading outpourings by ordinary sufferers. That is not to say they lack authenticity, but the style of the essays leads to this reviewer's recommendation that the audience for the book is persons who will relate to sophisticated writing. KLIATT Codes: A; Recommended for advanced students and adults. 2003, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 227p. illus., Boardman

Biography

Judith Greenberg has served as a visiting assistant professor at Williams College and Dartmouth College.