Trauma Culture: Film scholar E. Ann Kaplan responds to 9/11

It was September 11, 2001, but for E. Ann Kaplan, it could almost have been November 14, 1940. 

As she witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Towers through the window of an eastbound LIRR train, Professor Kaplan found herself reliving the terrors of a WWII-era British childhood: nightmares of sudden death and abandonment; claustrophobia associated with gas masks and bomb shelters; and especially the night of the Coventry Blitz, when she cowered under a staircase through a devastating Nazi air raid.

Her response to 9/11, Kaplan realized, was profoundly affected by her individual psychic history, and this perception led to some hard thinking — and a book — about the impact of trauma both on individuals and on entire cultures or nations.

In Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (2005), Kaplan, one of the nation's leading scholars of film and cultural studies, wields tools borrowed from a variety of disciplines in an attempt to make sense of 9/11 and its aftermath. The argument ranges freely — from fresh readings of Spellbound and Dances With Wolves to an unguarded account of her own experience of terror and trauma — and tackles sophisticated theoretical concepts in a lucid and accessible style.

Using herself as a case study is something of a departure from scholarly norms, but for Kaplan, who is Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at SB, it's a frequent strategy. Her seminal 1987 study of music videos, Rocking Around the Clock, took off from her daughter's obsession with MTV; 1992's Motherhood and Representation drew deeply on her difficult experiences as a single working mother.

"All scholarship is symptomatic," Kaplan explains.  "We choose topics because an unconscious interest propels us towards certain areas of study. In my own work I have always tried to acknowledge the importance of the personal."

The personal side of scholarship has proved useful to Kaplan in her role as founder and director of The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (HISB). Founded in 1987, HISB has three main missions: to stimulate new modes of interdisciplinary research within the humanities and social sciences; to build bridges between the human sciences and the medical, technical, and natural sciences; and to reach out to the local community through public lectures and film series.

The Institute's public face reflects its commitment to community outreach. Associate Director John Lutterbie heads "Civic Performance," a speaker series that brings HISB and the University into close contact with groups working for social change on Long Island. The ongoing Distinguished Lecturers series invites cutting-edge scholars to address subjects of immediate relevance to today's world, while "Human Rights, Language, and Imperialism," a symposium co-sponsored by HISB and the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC-Irvine, comes to campus April 20-21.

In keeping with the topical thrust of HISB's programming, Professor Kaplan will share her post-9/11 thinking in an April 18 public lecture entitled "Trauma Culture: Viewing Images of Catastrophe." The talk, part of the Provost's Lecture series, will take place in the Humanities Building Lecture Hall 1006 at 4:00 p.m. 

All are welcome, and lay people needn't fear being overwhelmed by academic jargon. "Our public events are sophisticated without being rarefied," Kaplan says. "It's part of a strategy for bringing theory to the community, and for bringing the community into the classroom."