Cultural Melancholia ― US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11

During the decade leading up to 9/11, an understanding of cultural trauma had formed in the US that singled out literary fiction as the main source for working through mass-scale catastrophes that have the potential to severely traumatize victims, says Cavedon, and starting on 12 September 2001, American novelists were called on to make their contribution to processing the alleged American collective trauma. She covers theorizations of melancholia, trauma studies in the medico-psychiatric field, theorizations of cultural trauma in relation to cultural melancholia, cultural narratives activated by the 9/11 attacks, white middle class melancholia in Jay McInerney's fiction, postmodern melancholia and the fantasy of the tuché in Don DeLillo pre-9/11 novels, and Falling Man's escape into hyper-reality. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Dr. Christina Cavedon works as research project coordinator at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and is a self-employed translator, editor, and research manager. She has a background in English Literature and Linguistics, Film Studies, and Art History.