25. Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (cont.)

The American Novel Since 1945 (ENGL 291)

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.

00:00 - Chapter 1. How to Define a Period of Literature: Locating Foer's Significance
05:57 - Chapter 2. Trauma Theory and the Holocaust: Foer's Use of the Witness
16:40 - Chapter 3. The Double Remove: A Third Generation of Memory
31:54 - Chapter 4. Metafictional Authorship
38:32 - Chapter 5. From Victims to Perpetrators

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

This course was recorded in Spring 2008.