ENGL 291: The American Novel Since 1945
Lecture 25 - Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (cont.). In her final lecture of the course, Professor Hungerford evaluates Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated with respect to one of her areas of expertise, American writing about the Holocaust. She points out how the novel takes on some of the questions of trauma theory in its examination of both the pain and the healing power of repetition. The most innovative characteristic of Foer's novel is, for Hungerford, the way it addresses the inheritance of the Holocaust for third-generation Jews in America. The novel finds new ways to provide witness for and connection to their grandparents' experiences in Europe, but also displaces a traditional Holocaust discovery narrative from the Jewish child of survivors to the Eastern European grandchild of those complicit in the destruction of shtetl life. (from oyc.yale.edu)
Lecture 25 - Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (cont.) |
Time | Lecture Chapters |
[00:00:00] | 1. How to Define a Period of Literature: Locating Foer's Significance |
[00:05:57] | 2. Trauma Theory and the Holocaust: Foer's Use of the Witness |
[00:16:40] | 3. The Double Remove: A Third Generation of Memory |
[00:31:54] | 4. Metafictional Authorship |
[00:38:32] | 5. From Victims to Perpetrators |
References |
Lecture 25 - Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (cont.) Instructor: Professor Amy Hungerford. Transcript [html]. Audio [mp3]. Download Video [mov]. |
Go to the Course Home or watch other lectures: