Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item The World Is Old and New Again: Cultural Trauma and September 11, 2001(2011) Muller, Christine; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the emergent cultural aftereffects of September 11, 2001. I consider how popular US narratives from the decade following that day's events evidence an ongoing, pervasive struggle with certain of the hijackings' especially troubling features, manifesting September 11 as a cultural trauma. I distinguish cultural trauma as an intersubjective phenomenon from psychological trauma and its individualized emphasis. I also distinguish my approach from the dominant ways historical, cultural and literary studies have typically conceptualized trauma as a primarily Freudian-theorized, pathological reaction to extreme happenings. Rather, drawing on Janoff-Bulman's shattered assumptions model of psychological trauma, I define cultural trauma as a radical disruption of basic, common, taken-for-granted, culturally-generated and -structured beliefs about what constitutes a community's ordinary life. I focus on how the hijackings' shocking and well-publicized developments shattered assumptions fundamental to mainstream American understandings of daily life. To trace these shattered assumptions, I review ten popular culture texts: three popular press oral history collections - the 2002 September 11: An Oral History, the 2002 Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, and the 2007 Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/11 - as well as the 2002 Frontline documentary "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero"; the 2003 Tom Junod Esquire article "The Falling Man"; the mid-to-late-2000s television series Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and FlashForward; the 2008 Christopher Nolan film The Dark Knight; and the 2007 Don DeLillo novel Falling Man. By assessing and comparing these texts' primary thematic concerns, I outline how each narrative, situated in varying media and genres, engages vulnerability in the forms of existential insecurity and the troubling of meaningful and ethical choice, exposing fragmented foundational beliefs in the wake of September 11. However, instead of reconstructing these fragmented pieces into an unequivocal new whole, these texts ambivalently instantiate that day's unresolved cultural fallout, serving to document the still evolving structures of feeling constituting this cultural trauma. Accordingly, this study evidences how popular culture serves as a site for recognizing and negotiating September 11 as a cultural trauma while suggesting how cultural trauma might be recognized and negotiated at other times of stark cultural change.Item Adjustment in Victims of September 11: Reactions to a Large-Scale Civilan Trauma(2004-08-06) Holmes, Stacey Elizabeth; Hoffman, Mary Ann; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study sought to examine reactions to the September 11 terrorist attacks and identify factors that could affect those reactions. Subjective well-being (SWB), impact of traumatic event, and job satisfaction served as the means of assessing adjustment to 9/11/01. It was predicted that those with better health perceptions, more positive psychological characteristics, and more social support would report better overall adjustment to the traumatic events experienced on September 11, 2001. While few hypotheses related to job satisfaction and impact of events were significant, both the psychological variables of resiliency and optimism were predictive of SWB before, two weeks after, and one year after 9/11/01, indicating that people in this sample who perceived themselves as more resilient and optimistic also reported higher levels of SWB or seemed to be happier and have a higher quality of life. Cluster analysis was also used to examine changes in SWB over time (before the event to two weeks after to one year after). The participants in this sample were found to cluster into four groups. The first group's levels of SWB stayed the same, and the second's declined. The third group's SWB increased after 9/11 and eventually returned to baseline, and the fourth group's SWB increased. Resiliency and optimism were found to relate to group membership. While many studies have demonstrated the maladaptive reactions that people have to trauma, this study provides evidence that some people actually report a higher level of SWB following a traumatic event. This study suggests that people who are more optimistic and who have higher levels of resiliency, particularly more feelings of determination and willingness to seek meaning, and fewer feelings of helplessness, will also report a higher level of subjective well-being after dealing with a traumatic event. This study is important because it provides evidence that people, specifically who are directly exposed to a traumatic event, do respond in very different ways. While some people are unaffected or negatively impacted by trauma, many others have positive outcomes (posttraumatic growth) that lead them to a greater appreciation for and more satisfaction with their lives than before the traumatic experience.