Document Type
Introduction
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In proposing this issue of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, we faced a paradox: how to write about the subject of 9/11 without reproducing the very mythologies that we set out to critique. We were all too aware of the profusion of references to September 11, 2001, and of the ways that the entire world had supposedly changed after that day. As David Simpson aptly describes it in his contribution to this issue, the date has come to stand in for “an event that thereby took on a certain automatism: one plane, then the next, one tower, then the next, all seen at a distance as if in the virtual environment of the cinema or video game....” How could we ruminate on 9/11 without falling into a trap of repetition, and thus implicitly (re)asserting the exceptional status of this monolithic date stamp? Uncertain about how to avoid this catch, we nevertheless felt the need to account for a wide range of subjects, and to work through some of the motifs readily identified as post-9/11.
Repository Citation
Schaberg, Christopher, and Kara Thompson. "Introduction to Reconstruction 11.2, 'Cultural Productions of 9/11': Avatars of 9/11." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–6. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss2/1