Deconstructing 'the abyss of the future:' Theatre, performance, and holes in the discourse of 9/1

My dissertation examines the manner in which 9/11 has been formulated as a historical sequence of events in the United States through performance, theatre, architecture, film and photography. It has been repeatedly stated that the events of 9/11 have so completely permeated our collective consciousness as to render their narrative re-presentation, at best, ineffective, and, at worst, superfluous. Not only were the attacks pre-imagined in countless disaster films, but they were also deliberately orchestrated to maximize not so much the loss of human life, but, as Jean Baudrillard has argued, their symbolic effect. My dissertation argues the opposite, namely that the events themselves have been, from the beginning, relegated to the realm of the symbolic and that what we refer to as "9/11" is itself a narrative construction.;Furthermore, I contend that in representing 9/11, a series of liminal space(s) opened up, at the intersection between the symbolic and the real exposing radical possibilities for the configuration of identity, nation and history. My project is to pry open these liminal spaces, to examine how 9/11 plays, film adaptations, select documentaries, and performances (construed broadly) engage the narrative of 9/11 outside of its conceptual framework. I ask: how might these works be understood as productive "holes in the discourse" (to draw on Julia Kristeva's formulation of the True-Real) of 9/11? How do these works interrogate and challenge the terms and binaries which define positionality in the wake of 9/11 and how do they redistribute cultural capital?...