Terror and the Cinematic Sublime: Essays on Violence and the Unpresentable in Post-9/11 Films - Tapa blanda

This study considers film in the aftermath of September 11. Eleven essayists address Hollywood movies, indie film, and post-cinematic media, including theatrical films by directors such as Steven Spielberg, Darren Aronofsky, and Lars von Trier, and post-cinematic works by Wafaa Bilal, Douglas Gordon, and Peter Tscherkassky, among others. All of these analyses are undertaken with an attentive eye to what may be the central concept of our time, the sublime. The sublime--that which can be thought but not represented (the ""unpresentable"")--provides a ready tool for analyses of trauma, horror, catastrophe and apocalypse, the military-industrial complex, the end of humanism, and the limits of freedom. Such essays take the pulse of our cultural moment, while also providing the reader with a sense of both the dual nature of the sublime in critical work, and how it continues to evolve conceptually in the 21st century.

Todd A. Comer is an associate professor of English at Defiance College in Ohio, USA and has published in such journals as SubStance, the Journal of Narrative Theory, and Journal of Modern Literature. Lloyd Isaac Vayo, an adjunct instructor at Concordia University-St. Paul, USA is currently at work on a project concerning class and the responsibility of the individual in a (post-)Occupy world. He lives in Perrysburg, Ohio, USA.