25 - Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (cont.)
Listen now
Description
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.
More Episodes
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...
Published 10/08/09
In this second lecture on The Known World, Professor Hungerford addresses Edward P. Jones's ambitious and ambivalent relation to literacy. Jones shows us the power of narrative to bring together the fragmentation of the world, but is at the same time deeply aware of the fragility of text, all of...
Published 10/08/09
In the first of her two lectures on Edward P. Jones's The Known World, Professor Hungerford begins from the novel's title, asking what counts as knowledge in the novel and why knowledge is central to the story. This leads to related questions: who is a knower, and what can be known? Highlighting...
Published 10/08/09