Traumatic Screens: 9/11 as seen from Mrs. Thompson's TV

  • Paolo Bugliani Università di Pisa
Keywords: David Forster Wallace, 9/11, trauma theory, essay

Abstract

The paper aims to read David Forster Wallace’s essay “The View From Mrs Thompson” (appeared in the October 25, 2001 issue of Rolling Stone) through the exegetic filter of trauma theory, in order to interpret the manner the author chose to account for his own account of the horror of 9/11, which he experimented not directly, but mediated by the screen of a television in a Midwest living room, namely Mrs Thompson.

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Author Biography

Paolo Bugliani, Università di Pisa
Paolo Bugliani is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, Pisa University. He is currently carrying out a research whose aim is to analyse the active role of the romantic essayists as mediators of Italian Cultural Heritage in England. At the same Department, he defended a PhD dissertation on the essayistic production of Charles Lamb, entitled Una modernità in sordina: Charles Lamb, il saggio, Elia, which was awarded the AIA-Carocci PhD Dissertation Prize in 2018Alongside the romantic essay, other parallel research interests have widened the chronological scope of his studies, including the Early Modern and Modernist ages (Thomas Browne, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden), as well as the contemporary period (D. F. Wallace and J. Franzen).

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Published
2018-11-30
How to Cite
Bugliani, P. (2018). Traumatic Screens: 9/11 as seen from Mrs. Thompson’s TV. Between, 8(16). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/3340