Date of Award
2026
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in English
Department
English and Creative Writing
First Advisor
Mary Cappello
Second Advisor
Peter Covino
Abstract
Debris Field: A Concordance is a hybrid creative dissertation project, and a formal and critical response to 9/11. This work contributes to an established field of disaster studies, and its interventions have well-defined angles into the field: the project focuses on the materialism of disaster’s durable archive; disaster’s public and private memorialization; the problem of writing the catastrophe using forms that do not replicate catastrophic powers; the aesthetic field of the postlapsarian vision; and the relationship between disaster and genre. These parameters might be applied to any given catastrophe, but Debris Field is laid out upon the site of my own public and personal disaster: the extinguished and remediated grasslands of the Flight 93 National Memorial in Stoystown, PA. The project’s material archive is composed of the remnants of the plane on which my father was murdered; its crash in an empty field on the morning of 9/11; the debris field and all of its collected and uncollected fallout; the bodies, the weapons, the remains. While troubling the seeming exhaustion and exhaustibility of 9/11 literature, challenging existing prejudices implicit to an already over-mined historical moment, and disrupting the memorial vernaculars and redemption arcs inherent to its telling, Debris Field also endeavors to finds a language and form that is true to its particular catastrophe, while addressing the dichotomy of public and private grief.
While this project theoretically tends to the subject of disaster, the poems and prose that make up the creative dissertation center on the specificities of the singular disaster, the actuality of its fallout. Debris Field is an anti-elegy that reassembles the materials of individual and public catastrophe at the crash site of the Flight 93 National Memorial. The collection implicitly retraces the flight path between Newark Airport and the coal fields of Somerset County, Pennsylvania. First person narrative is countered by a chorus of interlocutors: half sisters that weigh intimacy against estrangement; the beekeeper that oversees a remediation of the ecological ruin of the debris field; curators tasked with archiving the disaster; and the search dogs that question systems of power as they comb the crash site for bodies and remains. A refusal of imperial narratives, the redemption arc, and the voyeuristic gaze, Debris Field constructs a personal and speculative archive outside the bounds of institutional memory.
Recommended Citation
Rothenberg, Rachel, "DEBRIS FIELD: A CONCORDANCE" (2026). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 4565.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/4565