A misunderstanding: trauma and terrorism in the '9/11 fiction'

Abstract

The terrorist attacks in September 2001 were largely deemed by the media and cultural circles to be traumatic events. Since then, literary criticism has indiscriminately employed the concept of trauma in the so-called '9/11 fiction'. I shall offer a reading of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days (2005) and Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) regarding their critical view of the term. My contention is that the predominance of trauma as a theoretical apparatus for literary works is due to a) a misreading of the very term, detached from its original legal-medical context, and b) a slippage between the categories of fiction and history.