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September 11, 2001, New York City: the day terrorism impresses a powerful sequence of pictures on television viewers worldwide. Leading the image assault are depictions of the World Trade Center's (WTC) Twin Towers at the moment a ball of fire erupts from one of the buildings. News reports name it a "tragedy," and it looks like one, the day's events causing suffering, death, and loss on a scarcely conceivable scale. On the newspaper front pages of September 11 and 12, what we might call the "moment of attack" appears as the dominant news picture-type, commonly at the expense of all written reportage apart from an evocative headline, sometimes only a single word.¹ It is as a poster telegraphing a news-drama with many of Aristotle's components of tragedy: magnitude and gravity, completed action, an ordered sequence of events (strong plot) and spectacular effects. The fundament of tragedy in Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy—Dionysian destruction, a terrible depth beneath the sphere of Apollonian surfaces, images and beauty—may also be seen to appear in the shape of the giant flames and ominous smoke.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137012869_6

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