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

Soon after 9/11, I noticed a similarity between images of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb and the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Yet the popular discourses on the tragedy compared the attacks on the twin towers not with the devastation of a civilian population but with the attacks on our military ships in Pearl Harbor. This inspired me to think more carefully about how I could provoke students to fight the centripetal pull of the events. How could I create an environment where students felt both at ease to express their opinions freely and confident enough to challenge the false abstractions and simple dichotomies on which certainties are based? Where could they find the tools to break into the 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 the metropolitan New York area and had family and friends who worked or lived in lower Manhattan at the time of the attacks. Some had internships in "the city." Some are the sons and daughters of uniformed service personnel or are themselves firefighters, police officers, or postal workers. And a number of the students have their tuition paid by the military. Still, within the student body, there is diversity in political awareness and political sophistication.

This essay is about a course I taught during the 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 the senior class, especially important to the part-time and returning students. It tackles advanced work in the theoretical and critical context of the mass media as social phenomenon: their ontologies, codes and conventions, productions of meaning, and positioning of the viewer/reader. The course uses specific problematics, which change nearly every year, to encourage critical and creative thinking about the ways the media affect our personal and collective consciousness. The role of the instructor is primarily Socratic: to pose questions that unsettle and challenge, to test orthodoxies, and to suggest routes by which students can discover the theoretical methods appropriate for their endeavors.

I decided to devote the 2002-03 senior reading seminar to the study of representations of the Holocaust and the events of 9/11. We explored the theories of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Hayden White by concentrating on how the Holocaust and the recent attacks on the United States have been represented in the media and in the popular imagination. I did not mean to equate 9/11 and the Holocaust; rather, I wanted to draw on the substantial body of literature on how the Holocaust has been represented to acquire methods that we might adapt for our own analyses of the representations of 9/11: representations of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, of our traumatic loss, and of our personal and collective grief. I was hoping this analysis would help students resist the presumably hegemonic discourses on terror.