Contents introduction

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………2
CHAPTER I.

1. 
   Trauma as a Spatial Encounter……………………………………...3
   
2. 
   Trauma in the Age of Biopolitics. ………………………………….6
   
3. 
   Literatures of Trauma and the Trauma of Literature…………………13
   

CHAPTER II.
2.1. Laying Out the Narrative……………………………………………..19
2.2. Political Floodwaters and the Military City………………………….24
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………..33
REFERENCES…………………………………………………………..34

INTRODUCTION
It is as if we dwell in the unique time between a traumatic event and its symbolic impact, like in those brief moments after we are deeply cut, and before the full extent of the pain strikes us—it is open how the events will be symbolized, what their symbolic efficiency will be, what acts they will be evoked to justify. If nothing else, one can clearly experience yet again the limitation of our democracy: decisions are being made which will affect the fate of all of us, and all of us just wait, aware that we are utterly powerless.
Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real
In the wake of September 11^th, a national poll indicated that 73% of Americans found themselves to be traumatized to some degree by the attacks on the World Trade Center (Bennett 178). In the events that transpired that day and the aftermath that continued during the following months, America experienced a moment of national trauma that would irrevocably alter the nation’s political complexion. The psychological impact was equally profound. For those directly experiencing the attacks and those witnessing them on television, 9/11 initiated a radical, albeit temporary, disruption in the continuity of the nation’s political narrative, a narrative whose extraordinary resiliency depended in large part on its capacity to deny Americans crucial channels for political engagement. For just a moment, before the media and the state initiated aggressive projects of narrative production, Americans identified themselves not as citizens or consumers but as survivors and witnesses, subjects whose frames of reference had been temporarily ungrounded by the traumatic event. This study searches for moments like these, in which individuals—survivors, witnesses, even readers of fiction—by confronting and accessing trauma achieve critical distance from the political narratives produced by the state.