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This volume offers a critical analysis of a segment of American literary production surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. While focusing on the writing of Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, the author locates this work within a larger 9/11 cultural archive. The book proceeds by way of a series of thematic leaps in order to unearth the active entanglement of the event with systems of meaning and power that create the conditions for its emergence and understanding. The main problem of such an approach consists in articulating the three-fold relation at the heart of the archive in which issues of traumatic loss, affect, and politics appear as central: between the historical event, its cultural imprint, and the wider social system. In order to grasp these fundamental relations, the author resorts to a layered interpretive framework and engages a number of theoretical protocols, from psychoanalysis and nationalism studies to philosophy of history, world-system theory, and the heterogeneous critical practices of American Studies. Coming from a non-US Americanist perspective, this contribution to the scholarly production about 9/11 concentrates on trauma as a problem in the conceptualization the event, insists on globalization as its crucial context, and argues for a historical materialist approach to the 9/11 archive.
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Towering Figures Reading the 9/11 Archive COSTERUS NEW SERIES 190 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, László Sándor Chardonnens and Theo D’haen Towering Figures Reading the 9/11 Archive Sven Cvek Amsterdam-New York, NY 2011 Cover Image by Clémentine Choubrac. FDNY Firehouse Engine 28 & Ladder 11, Lower East Side, NYC. Image processing by Draško Ivezić. Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence". ISBN: 978-90-420-3378-8 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0076-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Printed in the Netherlands Dedicated to the memory of Aldo Cvek (1953-2009) CONTENTS Acknowledgments 5 Introduction: Reading the 9/11 Archive 7 1 Enduring Event: Telling Stories around September 11 18 Constant Replay: Community Building at the Site/Sight of Trauma 39 3 Common Ground: Melodramas of 9/11 58 4 Shock and Own: Mediation and Expropriation In the Shadow of No Towers 81 2 5 Globalizing (the) Nation 108 6 The Market Moves Us in Mysterious Ways: Don DeLillo on 9/11 123 Cosmopolis: A Meditation on Deterritorialization 151 Killing Politics: The Art of Recovery in Falling Man 181 Good Mourning, America: Genealogies of Loss in Against the Day 211 7 8 9 Conclusion 245 Bibliography 253 Index 265 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the first readers of this manuscript: Stipe Grgas (who supervised its inception), Sonja Bašić and Jelena Šesnić, my colleagues from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Their support and friendship surpass the covers of this book. For her timely interventions and patience, I am also grateful to Željka Švrljuga of the University of Bergen, Norway. This book grew out of the doctoral dissertation I started working on in 2006, during my Fulbright year as a visiting scholar at New York University. My experience in the American Studies Program at NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis has been invaluable, and I would like to give credit to all the people, both teach