Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the "War on Terror"

Description

September 11th, 2001 remains a focal point of American consciousness, a site demanding ongoing excavation, a site at which to mark before and after "everything" changed. In ways both real and intangible the entire sequence of events of that day continues to resonate in an endlessly proliferating aftermath of meanings that continue to evolve. Presenting a collection of analyses by an international body of scholars that examines America's recent history, this book focuses on popular culture as a profound discursive site of anxiety and discussion about 9/11 and demystifies the day's events in order to contextualize them into a historically grounded series of narratives that recognizes the complex relations of a globalized world. Essays in Reframing 9/11 share a collective drive to encourage new and original approaches for understanding the issues both within and beyond the official political rhetoric of the events of the "The Global War on Terror" and issues of national security.

Jeff Birkenstein is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington. Birkenstein's major interests lie in American Literature post-1865, American and world short story, the short story sequence, and cultural and food criticism. An edited collection of essays, Cultural Representation in the International Short Story Sequence (co-edited with Robert M. Luscher, University of Nebraska at Kearney) has just been accepted for publication. He has published several papers in academic journals as well as book reviews, commentaries, essays and a short story. He teaches a range of classes, from Freshman Seminar and Composition to African American Literature, The Short Story, Food & Fiction, and Narratives from the Aftermath of 9/11. Birkenstein received his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 2003; he has a second MA in Teaching English as a Second/Other Language. Anna Froula is an Assistant Professor of film studies at East Carolina University. Froula teaches courses on war literature and film, American outlaws, national mythology, and film history, theory, and fundamentals. She has published and presented on on representations of military women, masculinity, and World War II, Vietnam, and the "War on Terror." She is currently working on a manuscript that explores popular representations of American military women from World War II to the present. Karen Randell is Deputy Dean of Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of Film and Culture at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is published on trauma in film in Art in the Age of Terrorism (2005) and in SCREEN. She is co-editor(with Sean Redmond) of The War Body on Screen (Continuum, NY: 2008) and Screen Methods: Comparative Readings in Film Studies (2005) with Jacqueline Furby.

Looking well beyond the most obvious and familiar tales of contemporary terrorism and counter-terrorism to survey a twenty-first century America burdened and buoyed by a decade-long War on Terror, Reframing 9/11 offers an ambitious collection of theoretically savvy commentaries focusing on a wide array of popular texts, from zombie movies and video games to the Left Behind bestsellers and Bruce Springsteen's The Rising. Together, these essays explore the multivocal, disturbing, and tangled legacy of 9/11 as it reverberates culturally, politically, and socially through a globally stretched and strained America. --Gregory A. Waller, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University Reviewed in Darkmatter.