A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11

The 9/11 attacks have come to epitomize the entanglement of intimate vulnerability and virtual spectacle that is typical of the globalized present. Working with concepts of trauma, mediation, and materiality, this book offers radically new interpretive frames for interrogating representations of the attacks. Interconnections between clinical pathology, cultural trauma, and political aesthetics lay the foundations for exploring texts by Foer, Spiegelman, DeLillo, and Gibson. Exploring how contemporary trauma studies can take into account the digitization and virtuality of present-day realities, this book establishes a contemporary ethics of witnessing terror.