BACKWARDS TRAVELER(S): RE/WRITING POST-9/11 AMERICA

This paper enfolds and builds upon an earlier text (Giardina, 2003) which sought to bring personal understanding to the events of 9/11/2001. Comprised of separate yet interrelated and intersecting “writing-stories” (Richardson, 2000), the narrative collages that follow are caught up in the curve of time – a future nostalgia of bemused irony – that reflect the events of the last year against my own history and lived textuality as a white, liberal, middle-class graduate student at the University of Illinois. My goal is to uncover “new” versions of “truth,” new fictional (re)tellings of our experience(s) that adhere to a (post)-performative moral ethic of interpretation, care, and social change.