Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer - Analysis and Literary Context - Lecture 24

Explore a comprehensive analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated" in this 46-minute lecture from Yale University's "The American Novel Since 1945" course. Delve into various methods for approaching and evaluating contemporary fiction as Professor Hungerford examines Foer's adaptation of themes and styles from other authors. Discover how the novel attempts to merge the nineteenth-century social novel with Postmodernist techniques to address historical traumas. Investigate the balance between resonant emotion and sentimental cliché in Foer's work, and explore topics such as formative ambition, dialogue with literary tradition, negative spaces, and the fusion of sentiment and formal play in social postmodern novels. Gain insights into the campus novel genre and the distinction between sentiment and sentimentality in this thought-provoking literary analysis.