24. Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

The American Novel Since 1945 (ENGL 291)

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 cliché.

00:00 - Chapter 1. Foer's Formative Ambition
03:58 - Chapter 2. Dialog with the Literary Tradition
11:23 - Chapter 3. Absence at the Heart of Desire: Foer's Negative Spaces
22:05 - Chapter 4. Bringing Together Sentiment and Formal Play: A Social Postmodern Novel
26:39 - Chapter 5. The Campus Novel
31:32 - Chapter 6. Sentiment vs. Sentimentality

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Spring 2008.