9/11 Revisited

Remediation as a Tool to Rewrite the Cultural Memory of the Terrorist Attack of 2001

Abstract

Over the last two decades, 9/11 established itself as an object of interest for the academia, news outlets and the arts, generating a multitude of cultural artefacts that allow us, collectively, to revisit the event, reread it in different circumstances, and, ultimately, rewrite it.

Employing rewriting as a metaphor for a continuous process of representation and revision, this article explores the remediation of the terrorist attack of 2001 and how representations of the event across time and different media help consolidate its place in cultural memory. With this purpose in mind, it analyzes John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) and TV series Designated Survivor (2016) and discusses them as after-effects of 9/11.