Using Aristotle's Poetics as a point of departure, the author traces the forms or "stages" or terror as a cultural and performative principle through English Renaissance and Restoration plays, through the modern and postmodern, to contemporary terrorist "theatres." He ends with a look at hybrid modes of performance (experimental theatre, performance art, installations, and, of course, the "theatrical" terrorist act and the spectacles of the totalitarian...

"Narrating 9/11 challenges the notion that Americans have overcome the national trauma of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The volume responds to issues of war, surveillance, and the expanding security state, including the Bush Administration's policies on preemptive war, extraordinary rendition, torture abroad, and the suspension of privacy rights and civil liberties at home. Building on the work of Giorgio Agamben,...