Falling After 911

"Falling After 9/11 provides close readings of post 9/11 figures of falling in such exemplary American texts as DeLillo's novel, Falling Man, Diane Seuss's poem, "Falling Man," Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Richard Drew's famous photograph of the man falling from the World Trade Center. Considered from the perspective of trauma theory, Falling After 9/11 argues that the apparent failure of these texts to register fully the trauma of the day in fact points to a larger problem in the national tradition: the problem of reference--of how to refer to falling--in…