Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the "War on Terror"

by Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, Karen Randell

Overview

September 11th, 2001 remains a focal point of American consciousness, a site demanding ongoing excavation, a site at which to mark before and after "everything" changed. In ways both real and intangible the entire sequence of events of that day continues to resonate in an endlessly proliferating aftermath of meanings that continue to evolve. Presenting a collection of analyses by an international body of scholars that examines America's recent history, this book focuses on popular culture as a profound discursive site of anxiety and discussion about 9/11 and demystifies the day's events in order to contextualize them into a historically grounded series of narratives that recognizes the complex relations of a globalized world. Essays in Reframing 9/11 share a collective drive to encourage new and original approaches for understanding the issues both within and beyond the official political rhetoric of the events of the "The Global War on Terror" and issues of national security.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441119056
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/13/2010
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jeff Birkenstein is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington. Birkenstein's major interests lie in American Literature post-1865, American and world short story, the short story sequence, and cultural and food criticism. An edited collection of essays, Cultural Representation in the International Short Story Sequence (co-edited with Robert M. Luscher, University of Nebraska at Kearney) has just been accepted for publication. He has published several papers in academic jourbanals as well as book reviews, commentaries, essays and a short story. He teaches a range of classes, from Freshman Seminar and Composition to African American Literature, The Short Story, Food & Fiction, and Narratives from the Aftermath of 9/11. Birkenstein received his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 2003; he has a second MA in Teaching English as a Second/Other Language.

Anna Froula is an Assistant Professor of film studies at East Carolina University. Froula teaches courses on war literature and film, American outlaws, national mythology, and film history, theory, and fundamentals. She has published and presented on on representations of military women, masculinity, and World War II, Vietnam, and the "War on Terror." She is currently working on a manuscript that explores popular representations of American military women from World War II to the present.

Karen Randell is Deputy Dean of Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of Film and Culture at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is published on trauma in film in Art in the Age of Terrorism (2005) and in SCREEN. She is co-editor(with Sean Redmond) of The War Body on Screen (Continuum, NY: 2008) and Screen Methods: Comparative Readings in Film Studies (2005) with Jacqueline Furby.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword: Reza Aslan

Introduction: Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell

Section One: (Re)Creating Language

Chapter One: Fear, Terrorism and Popular Culture, David L. Altheide

Chapter Two: The Aesthetics of Destruction: Contemporary US Cinema and TV Culture , Mathias Nilges

Chapter Three: 9/11, British Muslims, and Popular Literary Fiction, Sara Upstone

Chapter Four: Left Behind in America: The Army of One at the End of History, Jonathan Vincent

Chapter Five: 9/11, Manhood, Mourbaning, and the American Romance, John Mead

Chapter Six: An Early Broadside: The Far Right Raids Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Jeff Birkenstein

Chapter Seven: The Sound of the "War on Terror", Corey K. Creekmur

Section Two: Visions of War and Terror

Chapter Eight: Avatars of Destruction: Cheerleading and Deconstructing the "War on Terror" in Video Games, David Annandale

Chapter Nine: The Land of the Dead and the Home of the Brave: Romero's vision of a Post 9/11 America, Terence McSweeney

Chapter Ten: Superman is the Faultline: Fissures in the Monomythic Man of Steel, Alex Evans

Chapter Eleven: The Tools and Toys of (the) War (on Terror): Consumer Desire, Military Fetish and Regime Change in Batman Begins, Justine Toh

Chapter Twelve: "It was like a movie": The impossibility of representation in Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006), Karen Randell

Chapter Thirteen: The Contemporary Politics of the Western Form: Bush, Saving Jessica Lynch, and Deadwood, Stacy Takacs

Section Three: Prophetic Narratives

Chapter Fourteen: Governing Fear in the Iron Cage of Rationalism: Terry Gilliam's Brazil through the 9/11 Looking Glass, David Price

Chapter Fifteen: Cultural Anxiety, Moral Clarity and Willful Amnesia: Filming Philip K. Dick After 9/11, Lance Rubin

Chapter Sixteen: Prolepsis and the "War on Terror": Zombie Pathology and the Culture of Fear in 28 Days Later..., Anna Froula

Afterword: John Cawelti

Notes on Contributors

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Looking well beyond the most obvious and familiar tales of contemporary terrorism and counter-terrorism to survey a twenty-first century America burdened and buoyed by a decade-long War on Terror, Reframing 9/11 offers an ambitious collection of theoretically savvy commentaries focusing on a wide array of popular texts, from zombie movies and video games to the Left Behind bestsellers and Bruce Springsteen's The Rising. Together, these essays explore the multivocal, disturbing, and tangled legacy of 9/11 as it reverberates culturally, politically, and socially through a globally stretched and strained America. Gregory A. Waller, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University

From the Publisher