Literary resonances The Depiction of 9/11 in Literature the role of images and intermedial references Sonia Baelo-Allué The 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States can be considered a cultural trauma and an intermedial phenomenon. The attack has become one of the most repre- sented disasters in history since it produced an unprecedented visual impact on those around the world who watched the second plane crash into the South Tower live on television. That 9/11 was a media event is inextricably linked to the way we remember the attacks and the way we coped with them when they took place. Many spectators watched the same loop of video footage and images over and over during the days following the attacks and used the TV screen as a protective shield against the reality they perceived. In an attempt to make sense of the unfolding trauma, and due to the ubiquity of similar disasters in U.S. cinema, many people compared the events with a Hollywood disaster movie; 1 the suicide attackers were likened to actors in a global superproduction. 2 Such views underlined the seemingly unreal nature of the events and the way they shattered our sense of reality. Maybe because the attacks seemed unreal, media reports on them used some of the conventions of ict ion. Andrew O’Hagan in the New York Review of Books even claimed that September 11 offered “a few hours when American novelists could only sit at home while journalism taught them ierce lessons in multivocality, point of view, the structure of plot, interior monologue, the pressure of history, the force of silence, and the uncanny. Actuality showed its own naked art that day.” 3 For O’Hagan it seems that what made journalism so powerful those days was the way it appropriated many of the conventions of iction (plot, point of view, interior mono- Radical History Review Issue 111 (Fall 2011) doi 10.1215/01636545-1268794 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. 184