Falling After 9/11

Crisis in American Art and Literature

Aimee Pozorski

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781501319631
• eBook ISBN: 9781628924428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Falling After 9/11 investigates 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's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Frédéric Briegbeder's Windows on the World, and Richard Drew's famous photograph of the man falling from the World Trade Center. Falling After 9/11 argues 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Falling After 9/11: A Crisis in National Tradition
• 1. Gravity, Gravitas, Grave: How to Refer to Falling?
• 2. Beyond the Literal: The Falling Man and Moral Failing
• 3. Journalism’s Falling Man: On Documentation and Truth Telling
• 4. Don DeLillo’s Performance Art: Failure Bears Witness to Falling
• 5. Poetics of Falling: The Lyrical Laments of Kennedy and Seuss
• 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
• Imprint