ABSTRACT
The 9/11 Museum immerses its visitors in suffering and loss. But what is so striking about the museum is that it commemorates a traumatic event that occurred in the lifetimes of most visitors. Traumatic events confuse our sense of time and place, unsettle our moral codes, and undermine a sense of who we are and how we relate to others. Trauma narratives simultaneously refer to the original event even as they remind us that they are mere substitutions. And yet, while literary narratives do not promise "ultimate" knowing, they do offer ways of understanding a traumatic experience. Trauma narratives and representations reflect on and explore the (im)possibility of meaning and understanding. As with trauma theory itself, trauma narratives do not "simply make a new claim to knowledge," but instead, they articulate a "kind of not-knowing at the heart of catastrophic experience, a resistance to conceptual assimilation, an intimate bond between knowing and not-knowing".
