ABSTRACT
Trauma criticism has no greater claim to ethical purity than any other critical practice. In their immediate aftermath, the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington were conceived and reconfigured as a collective trauma. Within a matter of days, if not hours, national and international media reached consensus that this enormous tragedy would affect the lives of millions of Americans. The emergence and enduring appeal of literary trauma criticism can be attributed to several factors. The ontological and epistemological foundations of trauma theory have far-reaching practical implications. In the clinical context, psychoanalytic and neurocognitive trauma theories have engendered vastly different therapeutic approaches, which have a significant impact on the meaning of trauma in the patient's life. For more than two decades, trauma has been a hot topic not only among scientists and therapists but also for scholars in the humanities.
