Teaching 9/11 and Why I'm Not Doing It Anymore

Abstract

Soon after 9/11, I noticed a similarity between images of Hiroshima after dropping of atomic bomb and wreckage of World Trade Center. Yet popular discourses on tragedy compared attacks on twin towers not with devastation of a civilian population but with attacks on our military ships in Pearl Harbor. This inspired me to think more carefully about how I could provoke students to fight centripetal pull of events. How could I create an environment where students felt both at ease to express their opinions freely and confident enough to challenge false abstractions and simple dichotomies on which certainties are based? Where could they find tools to break into monolithic discourses that were being erected? Sacred Heart University, where I teach media studies, is a working-class institution an hour from New York City. Many students come from metropolitan New York area and had family and friends who worked or lived in lower Manhattan at time of attacks. Some had internships in the city. Some are sons and daughters of uniformed service personnel or are themselves firefighters, police officers, or postal workers. And a number of students have their tuition paid by military. Still, within student body, there is diversity in political awareness and political sophistication. This essay is about a course I taught during 2002-03 academic year, Reading Seminar in Media and Cultural Theory. This one-semester seminar is an exit course, a culminating experience for students majoring in media studies, and a bonding opportunity for senior class, especially important to part-time and returning students. It tackles advanced work in theoretical and critical context of mass media as social phenomenon: their ontologies, codes and conventions, productions of meaning, and positioning of viewer/reader. The course uses specific problematics, which change nearly every year, to encourage critical and creative thinking about ways media affect our personal and collective consciousness. The role of instructor is primarily Socratic: to pose questions that unsettle and challenge, to test orthodoxies, and to suggest routes by which students can discover theoretical methods appropriate for their endeavors. I decided to devote 2002-03 senior reading seminar to study of representations of Holocaust and events of 9/11. We explored theories of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Hayden White by concentrating on how Holocaust and recent attacks on United States have been represented in media and in popular imagination. I did not mean to equate 9/11 and Holocaust; rather, I wanted to draw on substantial body of literature on how Holocaust has been represented to acquire methods that we might adapt for our own analyses of representations of 9/11: representations of attacks on World Trade