The Tragic Critic after 9/11

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1495-1503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wallace
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
A Value ◽  
Trade Center ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

In the Autumn of 2002, I Gave a Lecture on Mourning the Dead to Final-Year Undergraduates at the University of Cambridge studying the compulsory course on tragedy. The lecture covered the care devoted to the dead body in Sophocles's Antigone and Hamlet's reflections, over Ophelia's grave, on the “fine revolution” of the material corpse (5.1.82-83). But it also extended its range to include the then very recent excavation, for eight and a half months, at Ground Zero in search of the remains of the dead victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, and the simultaneous daily publication in the New York Times of “Portraits of Grief.” These portraits, I maintained, fulfilled a similar function to tragic drama by refocusing attention on the individual life and by finding a narrative arc to each victim's story, like Aristotle's tragic plots, which must have “a beginning, a middle, and an end” (26). While the firefighters' digging equipment at Ground Zero searched in vain for the missing remains of about 1800 people and eventually hit bedrock, the newspaper reinvested each lost person with significance, finding a value and a pattern in the person's life.

Forting Up the Skyline: Rebuilding at Ground Zero

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harvey Molotch
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World Trade ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
Security Measures ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
The World ◽  
Trade Center

This chapter focuses on Ground Zero and the successive attempts to rebuild. It treats the replacement skyline of New York as a great mishap and wasted opportunity. Security measures display, on the ground, some rather new ways that political authority combines with market forces to shape the world. Although there were varied aesthetic and moral visions of what should happen at the site, the pugilist instinct predominated. Post-9/11 measures to protect the downtown called for not just any sort of buildings, but those that would show the enemy that we could build tall and powerful. The result is a different kind of building in the form of One World Trade Center, also known as “Freedom Tower.” It is argued that the “program” for the structure, still in another way, created vulnerabilities through misguided hardening up.

Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Zeitlin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World Trade ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
New York University ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
The World ◽  
Trade Center ◽  
Union Square ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter considers the proliferation of street poems as a form of healing and remembrance after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City. In the days and weeks that followed the attack on the World Trade Center, the streets of New York lay eerily quiet and deserted. The poets did not wait for the dust to settle. As streams of water poured over the smoke at Ground Zero, distraught and bereaved New Yorkers scrawled missives in the ash. On the afternoon of the first day, Jordan Schuster, a student from New York University, laid out a sheet of butcher paper in Union Square; he was the first of many to inspire his fellow New Yorkers to set down their thoughts in poetry. Words proliferated into a barrage of written feeling that vented rage and offered solace. Street shrines served as portals for the living to talk directly to the terrorists.

scholarly journals Ground Zero comme spectacle

2006 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-108
Author(s):  
Alan Blum
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World Trade ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
Mode De Vie ◽  
Trade Center

Résumé Le discours sur la globalisation avance que l’identité locale est de plus en plus menacée par la similarité croissante qui s’établit entre les villes, contribuant à uniformiser leur apparence jusqu’à les rendre indifférenciables les unes des autres. Une des fonctions (ou une des conséquences non anticipées) de cette menace est de dramatiser la question de l’identité elle-même, et va jusqu’à mettre en cause son caractère illusoire et désuet. Si l’« identité » fait référence à la différence que fait un lieu, ce qui semble se perdre, toujours selon cette perspective, c’est la différence elle-même. La valeur d’usage des villes apparaît de plus en plus être confondue par une conception de leur valeur d’échange. Cela signifie que si la globalisation tend à nous faire traiter de l’identité d’une ville comme New York comme d’une ville globale (comme le centre du capitalisme), l’identité devient simultanément une « variable » liée à une norme qui sanctionne des visions génériques de l’identité urbaine. En formant ce spectre, la globalisation tend aussi à nous faire réfléchir l’identité comme quelque chose de plus que cela, comme partie prenante d’une dynamique et du détail local d’un lieu (dans ce cas-ci, New York) comme expression de l’accent spécifique que met une ville sur ce que Louis Wirth a appelé un « mode de vie urbain ». Le site de Ground Zero fait apparaître et spectacularise les limites de la notion de ville globale en tant qu’identité, non pas en lui substituant une identité autre dans un processus infini, mais en révélant, comme tout travail présuppose dans le cas d’une telle caractérisation générique, une référence implicite et inédite à un système de désir. Dans les termes de la sociologie, ceci fait référence à la ville en tant que situation d’action. Affronter ce problème de la reconstruction à New York signifie alors faire face au problème de recréer le désir selon des modes beaucoup plus profonds que la simple restauration économique. Dans ce sens, l’attaque du World Trade Center soulève la vieille question de la différence entre urbanisation et urbanité, et celle de la manière par laquelle l’identité, comme problème collectif, est constamment retravaillée dans un tel lieu. La reconstruction de Ground Zero révèle les débats au sujet de la différence de New York comme ville.

scholarly journals Visiting Ground Zero: sacred echoes in secular rites

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 268-287
Author(s):  
Richard Martin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World Trade ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Trade Center ◽  
Religious Aspects

For the past several years since September 11, 2001, large numbers of people from across the continent and around the world have visited the site of the devastated World Trade Center in New York. Scholars in religious studies and the social sciences have noticed that there were and continue to be (though less so over time) religious aspects to the observances and performances of visitors to ‘Ground Zero’, as the site of the former World Trade Center almost immediately came to be called. A central argument of this article is that the ongoing stream of visitors to Ground Zero, strictly speaking, does not qualify this phenomenon as a pilgrimage in the traditional religious sense; it is more akin to the growing phenomenon of religious tourism, although it is not exactly that either. Nonetheless the event of 9/11 generated many ritualized activities; the article will also address the pro­cess scholars call ‘ritualization’ and related terms in ritual studies. Although ritualized performances at Ground Zero do not amount to a pilgrimage in the narrow sense that historians of religion mean when they analyse traditional pilgrimages, such as the Hajj to Mecca, or following the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, visiting Ground Zero has taken on both secular and religious elements.

scholarly journals Helping at Ground Zero: the experience of four Canadian emergency medicine residents and an emergency department nurse

CJEM ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (02) ◽  
pp. 115-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Carvalho ◽  
Marie-Elaine Delvin ◽  
Carolyn Rosenczweig ◽  
Sujit Sivarman ◽  
Raghu Venugopal
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Department ◽  
New York ◽  
World Trade ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Médecine D’Urgence ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
Compte Rendu ◽  
Emergency Department Nurse ◽  
Trade Center

SOMMAIRE Le 11 septembre 2001, le monde a été témoin d’une des pires attaques terroristes de l’histoire de l’humanité dirigée contre les deux Tours du World Trade Center à New York, et contre le Pentagone à Washington, DC. En tant que contingent canadien non officiel formé de quatre résidents en médecine d’urgence et d’une infirmière d’urgence, nous nous sommes joints au personnel médical américain pour offrir notre aide au cours de la phase de sauvetage à New York. Nous présentons un compte-rendu de notre expérience en tant que bénévoles au centre principal de triage de «Ground Zero.» Nous dressons le bilan des leçons que nous avons tirées de l’expérience et discutons du rôle du résident dans une situation de désastre.

Mapping September 11, 2001: Cartographic Narrative in the Print Media

2004 ◽  
pp. 13-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert R. Churchill ◽  
Suzanne J. Slarsky
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Electronic Publishing ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Trade Center ◽  
The Times ◽  
Public Reaction

The attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were unprecedented in scope if not in their fundamental nature. While the United States moved toward resurrection of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, known popularly as “Star Wars”, and focused its resources on sophisticated weaponry, terrorists with primitive weapons turned commercial aircraft into guided missiles. The suddenness and enormity of the events, coupled with the fact that so many people were acquainted with victims of the attacks, created a sense of concern and confusion that was more pervasive and ubiquitous than evoked by either the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center or the 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building. In the immediate aftermath, the events of September 11attracted the sympathies of the entire country, evoked both an outpouring of patriotism and a rhetoric of retribution, and temporarily redefined task saliencies (Wright, 1978) as firefighters and law enforcement officers became heroes of the moment.The media also assumed a heightened level of importance as people turned to television, the Internet, and print for information and for insight and meaning. On September 11, the New York Times recorded over 21 million page views on their site, more than twice the previous record, and a six-month circulation audit by the Times following September 11 showed daily gains of approximately 42,000 newspapers (Robinson, 2002). Since the number of maps appearing in the media has grown rapidly with the advent of desktop computing and electronic publishing technologies (Monmonier, 1989; 2001), it is not surprising that much of the story of September 11 has been illustrated with maps. At the very least, these maps offer distinctive insights that help define both the events and the public reaction, but a paradigm shift that emphasizes their textual nature suggests that in addition to illustrating the attacks and the subsequent events, maps cast their own narratives of these events. Our purpose here is to explore these narratives through a systematic examination of maps that appeared in the print media in the period immediately following September 11.

For Your Information

1982 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-24
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Criminal Behavior ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
Anthropological Perspective ◽  
Trade Center ◽  
The University ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Unpublished Research

Information is requested for the publication of an article on the relationship of alcohol use to violence and criminal behavior. The article, employing a cross-cultural anthropological perspective, is to appear in the book Alcohol and Aggression edited by Paul F. Brain of the University of Swansea, to be published in England. Reprints, unpublished research papers, dissertations, dissertation abstracts, and project reports by anthropologists or other qualitative researchers should be sent by January 1, 1983 to David Strug, Narcotic and Drug Research, Inc., Room 6754, Two World Trade Center, New York, NY 10047.

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