Introduction

The World Trade Center (WTC), like any famous skyscraper, was both real and imaginary. It was a commercial and tourist center, occupied every day by tens of thousands. As two of the tallest buildings in the world, the towers also stood for American power and commerce, and for capitalism more generally. After their destruction on September 11, 2001, these roles—what literary studies might call the literal and the figurative— remained, but their relationship changed: the material reality or “fact” of the destruction of the towers has itself been overwhelming, but this destruction has increasingly been understood and represented through a range of complex symbolic formations.