ABSTRACT
No image evokes the terror of 9/11 like that of the ‘Falling Man,’ a person in headrst fall from the World Trade Center captured by Richard Drew; this photograph crystallizes what I dene to be the most pivotal challenges of trauma in the early 21st century. It is an image of intimate suffering at rst, but ultimately owes its fame to being much more than that: the striking contrast between vulnerable body and an architecture of glass and steel, the ambivalent publishing history between global spectacle and journalistic taboo, all point to the necessity of rethinking our habitual frames of response to terrorist violence. On September 11, 2001, trauma emerged to be both intimately corporeal and viral. Hence, it is the aim of this book to contribute to a trauma theory that is responsive to these changes in structures of mediation and experience. Although the core challenge of trauma remains unchanged, when it denotes an experience of unspeakable terror and thus epitomizes the limits of literary representation itself, we also need to recognize that, as Michael Rothberg puts it, “Trauma today is probably not the trauma of twenty years ago and certainly not the trauma of the early twentieth century” (2014, xi).
