Out of Ground Zero: Catastrophe and Memory

Course Highlights

This course features reading questions, located in the study materials section.

Course Description

Within twenty-four hours of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 politicians, artists, and cultural critics had begun to ask how to memorialize the deaths of thousands of people. This question persists today, but it can also be countered with another: is building a monument the best way to commemorate that moment in history? What might other discourses, media, and art forms offer in such a project of collective memory? How can these cultural formations help us to assess the immediate reaction to the attack? To approach these issues, "Out of Ground Zero" looks back to earlier sites of catastrophe in Germany and Japan.

Other OCW Versions

Archived versions:

• 21G.013 Out of Ground Zero: Catastrophe and Memory (Fall 2002)

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• Sociology
• Anthropology > Cultural Anthropology
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