Whose Losses, Whose Literature? The Place of 9/11 in Picture Books

• In Event: 68.061 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 68.061-5 - Constructing Knowledge in an Infinite Future: Terror, Trauma, Mental Illness, and Immortality

Abstract

Picture books that attempt to address the 9/11 attacks provide a significant problem for a tradition of theorizing trauma in children's literature (Bettelheim, Coats): on the one hand, these texts introduce a loss that is not (yet) the children's own; on the other, the texts offer no possibility of mourning. Drawing from Freud, Britzman, and Tribunella, we argue that the function of these books is to establish a shared melancholic object: an ineffable loss that serves to shape the culture that shares it.

Authors

• James Stillwaggon, Iona College

• Alyssa Messina, Iona College