Embodied Trauma and Pastoral Relief: The Rhetoric of the Flight 93 National Memorial

Abstract

Distinctive among memorials for its rurality and its integration of the natural landscape, the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania narrates the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 through an embodied experience of trauma and relief. In this article, we analyze the rhetorical interaction between the memorial’s pastoral setting and the Visitor Center’s traumatic and temporal reenactment of the doomed flight. Contributing to scholarly understanding of how pastoral landscape functions in memorialization, we argue that the memorial’s materiality interpellates visitors into the subject position of a safety-seeking citizen, which facilitates the unquestioned militarization of the nation-state.