The following is a list of some texts that I used and/or consulted in researching this essay. The books are grouped by subject and then listed alphabetically.

Assessing September 11: Hysterical Medias and Postmodernity

Chomsky, Noam. 9-11. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
The popularity of Chomsky's 9-11 is not surprising. Chomsky's book was one of the first analyses of September 11 published and it was prominently displayed in most independent and chain bookstores. (I found my copy near the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" book series at Borders). Despite its innocuous location, I found 9-11 to be a scathing critique of America's political responses to September 11. 9-11 is actually a collection of interviews Chomsky did with members of the foreign press after September 11 so there is not one general thesis in it, per se.
Significantly, Chomsky also critiques the rhetoric of the U.S. news media in 9-11. Thus, he builds upon the issues raised in Manufacturing Consent which I cite in the next section of this bibliography. 9-11 is a fascinating and often very angry text, but it does not propose a theory of understanding September 11 in the way that "The Dialectics of Disaster" or Welcome to the Desert of the Real! each do.

Huerwas, Stanley and Frank Lentricchia editors. "Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11." A Special Issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 Spring 2002.
I've chosen to cite the entire issue of "Dissent from the Homeland" because of its wide critical scope. Huerwas and Lentricchia pulled together a distinguished and varied group of critics who write on a variety of interrelated subjects: America's involvement in Afghanistan, the U.S. media's reaction to September 11, and, more broadly, America's imperial project in the Middle East. Many of the articles in the issue are written from a postmodern perspective and there are also some interesting articles published by prominent religious figures and artists. You can read the hypertext version of the issue by clicking here.

Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! London: Verso, 2002.
To mark the first anniversary of September 11, 2002, Verso Press published three books that discuss the U.S. media and September 11. Along with Jean Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism and Paul Virilio's Ground Zero, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! enthusiastically critiques depictions of violence in contemporary American culture. Zizek has written many books about postmodernism and the culture of late capitalism and it is possible to see many similarities between his depiction of September 11 and that of Fredric Jameson. I found Chapter 2 "Reappropriations: The Lesson of Mullah Omar" to be particularly useful in thinking about how we might categorize the multiplicity of responses to September 11. In this chapter, Zizek discusses in detail the U.S. media's reaction to September 11 and the implications of September 11 for postmodern critics. For example, Zikek notes "comments like 'The End of the Age of Irony' have abounded in our media, pushing home the notion that the age of a postmodern deconstructive sliding of sense is over: now once again [the media and some scholars argue] we need firm and unambiguous commitments" (34). Welcome to the Desert of the Real! does a good job of orienting its reader to the politicality of September 11-as well as the most common criticisms of postmodern interpretations of the events. An excerpt from Welcome to the Desert of the Real! was published in the South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue "Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11." The hypertext version of the article is available by clicking here.

Theorizing the U.S. Media

Barton, Michael. "Journalistic Gore: Disaster Reporting and Emotional Discourse in the New York Times, 1852-1956" in An Emotional History of the United States. Ed. Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis.
Barton provides a helpful overview of the metamorphosis of disaster reporting from the height of the Victorian era to the dawning of the cold war. Seeing the "troubling representations" of the current U.S. media as signifiers of modernity, Barton sets out to understand how the contemporary media became so gory (155). Surprisingly, he finds that media gore is nothing new-amusement parks in the 1890s reenacted horrible disasters, which he reads as the origins of disaster films, like Twister and hysterical media representations of disasters. This leads Barton to argue, among other things, that modernity is a more flexible category than he initially imagined.

Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 2002.
Herman and Chomsky recently significantly revised Manufacturing Consent and the result is a helpful revision of their first, path-breaking work on the American media apparatus. The discussion of the Propaganda Model-Herman and Chomsky's conception of the structure of the U.S. media, which they see as serving powerful economic and political structures in America-is particularly interesting and was useful for me in thinking about my essay. However, Manufacturing Consent leaves me with some lingering criticisms. The propaganda model lacks any real conception of human agency it is a mechanical model in which the political and economic interests of our late capitalist system seem to act as gods (seemingly taking the conception of deus ex machina to a new level). In order for their argument to hold up, Chomsky and Herman need to more fully trouble how human motivation and feeling have led to the media's representations of violence, terror, and sympathy.

Stearns, Peter N. American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
Stearns' text does an excellent job of discussing the means through which in America, grief has the potential to be sublimated by society. Stearns explores how the American media has become an outlet for intense expressions of grief, sadness and anger (282). While Jameson argues that the U.S. media has caused a dissociation of sensibility, Stearns asserts that there is more reciprocity between the media and its viewers, listeners and readers. For Stearns, the media allows us to feel emotions that our "impersonal but friendly" day-to-day life does not allow. In contrast to Jameson, Stearns seems to imply that the media feels for us what we want to feel, rather than feeling for us, what the prison of late-capitalism and postmodernism would have us feel.

Works by Fredric Jameson

Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1998.
The Cultural Turn brings together a variety of Jameson's most important works on postmodernism. As Perry Anderson argues in his forward, "The Cultural Turn offers the most compact and complete resume of the development of his thinking on the subject [of postmodernism] across two decades of intensely productive reflections" (xi). Of Jameson's many works, I would suggest that The Cultural Turn and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism are the two that are the most indispensable. Within The Cultural Turn, two essay, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" (1982) and "Culture and Finance Capital" (1996) stand out as particularly significant investigations of postmodernism. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" was a foundational work within the canon of postmodern literary and cultural criticism. Furthermore, it is an essay implicitly related to the particular brand of capitalism marked by "Reaganomics" policies in place in America during the 1980s. In it, Jameson asserts, "the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late consumer or multinational capitalism" (20). The consequences of this particular historic moment are imagined to be "the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past" (20). Thus, Jameson lays the groundwork for one of the most fundamental subtexts of his understanding of postmodernism: the disappearance of a sense of past in our lives and the condition of "historical amnesia" (20).

In contrast, "Culture and Finance Capital" illustrates how the rise in information technology and globalism in the 1990s has led to the necessary evolution of postmodernism and the culture of late capitalism. Jameson ends the essay by linking the "play of monetary entities" of finance capital with the "narrativized image-fragments of a stereotypical postmodern language" which suggests a "new cultural realm or dimension which is independent of the former real world" (161). Jameson argues that both of these systems will lead to what he describes ominously as "a crash" and vows to discuss this crash in "another book and another time" (161).

--------"The Dialectics of Disaster." The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002): 297-304.
Jameson's short essay published in a special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly describes how the U.S. media's affective and pervasive grief over September 11 has led to a collective "dissociation of sensibility" (297). Building upon his conception of historical amnesia first seen in "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," Jameson describes the media as imprisoning us within a matrix of numbness and postmodernity. Although Jameson has always noted that some cultural apparatuses have the potential to playfully subvert negative aspects of postmodernity, "The Dialectics of Disaster" makes explicit the deleterious effect of the media on our consciousness and ability to think and feel for ourselves. You can view this article by clicking here.