ENGL 291: The American Novel Since 1945
Lecture 24 - Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated. In this first of two lectures on the students' choice end-of-semester novel, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated (2002), Professor Hungerford models several methods for approaching and evaluating a new work of fiction. She shows how Foer borrows and adapts themes and styles from other authors on the syllabus in service to his ambition as a writer to demonstrate the power of narrative fiction to address the great historical traumas of our time. In thus attempting to marry the nineteenth-century social novel with Postmodernist, or late Modernist, techniques, Foer participates in an emerging tradition that risks the confusion between resonant emotion and sentimental cliche. (from oyc.yale.edu)
Lecture 24 - Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated |
Time | Lecture Chapters |
[00:00:00] | 1. Foer's Formative Ambition |
[00:03:58] | 2. Dialog with the Literary Tradition |
[00:11:23] | 3. Absence at the Heart of Desire: Foer's Negative Spaces |
[00:22:05] | 4. Bringing Together Sentiment and Formal Play: A Social Postmodern Novel |
[00:26:39] | 5. The Campus Novel |
[00:31:32] | 6. Sentiment vs. Sentimentality |
References |
Lecture 24 - Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated Instructor: Professor Amy Hungerford. Transcript [html]. Audio [mp3]. Download Video [mov]. |
Go to the Course Home or watch other lectures: