Academic Bulletin Freshman Tutorials - 2011-12 - 11 FT 11

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The worst terrorist incident to occur on American soil, the 9/11 attacks were a transformational event. They took the country into “The Global War on Terror,” land wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the curtailment of civil rights. The attacks brought new terminologies into our lexicon, like “Al-Qaeda,” “National Threat Level,” and “Homeland.” 9/11 is one of a select few moments in modern American history—the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Challenger disaster are others—that is etched in our collective cultural memory, carved into our national soul. We still live today, as Art Speigelman put it, “in the shadow of no towers.” In the aftermath, people sought to express their grief, rage, bewilderment, and love as people always have: through art. As a result, 9/11 has also had a seismic effect on our culture. In novels (Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), films (World Trade Center, United 93), plays (Anne Nelson’s The Guys, Neil LeBute’s The Mercy Seat), graphic novels and media (Art Speigelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation), and poetry, (Seamus Heaney’s “Anything Can Happen”), artists and writers sought to make sense of an event that rendered even the idea of artistic representation problematic to some. Drawing on these texts, some of which were written while the towers still smoldered, we will also try to make sense of an event that transformed all of our lives, and confronts us with questions every day. How shall we commemorate the dead? How is the omnipresent threat of terrorism represented in culture? How do art, literature, and performance represent trauma? In this course we will ask: ten years later, what does 9/11 mean?