From grief to hope: A study of how the 'New York Times' inspired a nation to transcend the tragedy of 9/11

In this study, I analyze how the New York Times' "Portraits of Grief" inspired a nation to transcend the tragedy of 9/11. Using as a case study the newspaper's life stories of the nearly 3,000 victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, I employ historical research and close textual reading to demonstrate how discursive performance constitutes public memory of 9/11. I examine how a team of 155 Times' writers humanizes the mass tragedy by writing "obituaries" that celebrate how each individual lived, rather than grieving over how thousands died. I explicate how the Times' interweaving of official and vernacular language shapes individual cultural values like loyalty, courage, and altruism into civic virtues and transforms victims into heroes. I analyze how daily publication of the individual profiles generates a discourse of healing, as the Times' "imagined community" of readers unites in loss to affirm life and creates a vision of what their community can come to mean: Through civic dialogue, the nation moves from grief to resilience and finally hope. Survivors' memories of the past and their vision for the future thus come together in the text to establish public knowledge of the loss on 9/11, thereby constituting public memory about the larger historical tragedy and defining a collective meaning for the future.;"Portraits of Grief" emerged from the tragedy of 9/11 as a new body of memorialization discourse inscribing in collective consciousness deeply held cultural values that reflected the nation's identity at the turn of the twenty-first century. The victims' stories had to be told in order for America to understand the value of what it had lost and to validate, protect, and perpetuate those ideals. The Times' creation of an innovative, appropriate, and authentic discursive response to 9/11, therefore, underscores that a particular memorialization text addressing a specific tragedy at the most opportune time can constitute public memory of an historical event, while also offering a bereaved community a discursive bridge from grief to hope, and thus ultimately renew the human spirit.