Falling After 9/11 Crisis in American Art and Literature [Paperback]

Falling After 9/11investigates the connections between violence, trauma, and aesthetics by exploring post 9/11 figures of falling in art and literature. From the perspective of trauma theory, Aimee Pozorski provides close readings of figures of falling in such exemplary American texts as Don DeLillo's novel,Falling Man, Diane Seuss's poem, Falling Man, Jonathan Safran Foer'sExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Fr?d?ric Briegbeder'sWindows on the World, and Richard Drew's famous photograph of the man falling from the World Trade Center.

Falling After 9/11argues that the apparent failure of these texts to register fully the trauma of the day in fact points to a larger problem in the national tradition: the problem of reference-of how to refer to falling-in the 21st century and beyond.

Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature

Chapter 1 Gravity, Gravitas, Grave: How to Refer to Falling

Chapter 2 Beyond the Literal: The Falling Man and Moral Failing

Chapter 3 Journalism's Falling Man: Documentation and Truth-Telling

Chapter 4 Don DeLillo's Performance Art: Failure Bears Witness to Falling

Chapter 5 The Poetics of Falling: The Lyrical Laments of Kennedy and Seuss

Chapter 6 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Historical Reverberation and Scientific Invention in Jonathan Safran Foer's 9/11 Iconotext

Epilogue Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: Parrish's 9/11 Mural Revisited

Works Cited
Index

Pozorski examines the figure of the falling man in 9/11 literature and the arts, and its representation within the theoretical framework of trauma & Pozorski is at her best when she shows how, as she writes in the introduction, critics in the contemporary art and literary worlds demand representations of 9/11 fraught with jarring images. The author successfully highlights the contradictory blÓe