A final hint for the final exam ....

One of the questions on the final exam will ask you to read this article by Jonathan Safran Foer.

You will have the article with your exam, but you may want to get a head start and read it ahead of time. Also, the font in the handout of this article is quite small, so you may want to spare your eyes.

Final exam structure and hints

Final Exam: Dec 3^rd and 5^th

On Dec 3, you will write an in-class exam. This will be a closed-book exam. There will be 8 short answer questions worth 5 marks each, which means that each answer needs to be fairly substantial to earn a potential five marks. The exam questions will mostly be focused on the material since the mid-term (Breakfast of Champions, Adaptation, Everything is Illuminated), but some questions will ask you to make connections to previous work.

Hints for exam questions:

• One question will be from the handout of questions on Breakfast of Champions that we did in groups
• There will one question that asks you to compare the novel Everything is Illuminated with its film adaptation
• Review the major themes we have been discussing in Everything is Illuminated, as well as in the course at large. Consider also our discussion about the postmodern deflation of the status of the author

On Dec 5, you will write an in-class essay. You will see the essay topics on your exam sheet on Dec 3, but you cannot bring in outside notes. You will be permitted to use your novel only. There will be a choice of three essay questions on the novel.

Reminder for Writing a Literary Analysis Essay:

A) Introduction

1. Topic Sentence

The first sentence of your introduction should provide the name of the author, the name of the text, and the main subject of your essay. Do not write in general terms about the subject as it relates to real life.

Which one of these topic sentences is more effective? Why?

1. “In our days, it is rare that we know only one version of a certain subject.”

2. “Ann Sexton and Angela Carter’s versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” differ greatly from each other.”

Rewrite the following topic sentence to make them more effective:

1. “The two rewritings of the Little Red Riding Hood story are “Red Riding Hood” by Anne Sexton and “The Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter.”

B. Thesis statement

Your thesis statement should be as specific as possible. Do not make reference to what you will write about later; this style of “announcing” your plan will give you a statement of intention, but will not give you a thesis statement.

Which of the following statements is more effective? Why?

1. “In both stories, the authors ridicule the main character and make the story ironic.”
2. “In this essay I will begin by briefly discussing the author’s representation of the main character in each story and then I will compare and contrast the two.”

Rewrite the following thesis statements to make them more effective:

1. “The central character of story can be related to postmodern concepts.”
2. “This essay will examine how the two tales are considered as postmodern literary works, and also why Sexton rewrites these two characters into her own versions of fairy tales.”
3. “In this short essay I will analyze two of Anne Sexton’s remakes: Cinderella and Rumpelstilskin. I will elaborate on what makes these fictitious stories postmodern and what the author’s goals are for rewriting these characters.

C. Sentence Structure

Comma splices

A comma splice occurs when you join two separate sentences with a comma, which is not sufficient punctuation to join two separate sentences. Join them with a connecting word or separate into two sentences.

1. Fairy tales are cautionary takes, they teach morals and a clear sense of good and evil is shown.

Review Questions for Everything is Illuminated

Review questions: Everything is Illuminated

1. How would you describe the two voices that tell the story (Alex and Jonathan's)? How is their language different? In what ways do the narratives intersect or move away from one another? Why do you think the author chose to write the novel in this way?

2. Why does Jonathan travel to Ukraine? What is he searching for? What are Alex and his grandfather searching for on the journey? What does each character find?
3. In an interview, Jonathan Safran Foer said that “Everything is Illuminated is, above all things, about love – between parent and child, between lovers, friends, and generations, between what happened and what will happen.” Where do you see examples of each of these types of love in the novel? How does the theme of love influence the course of the novel?
4. On page 265-6, Jonathan writes, “Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after the years of pure and unwavering grief, to realize she has slept a good night's sleep, and will able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time.” How do the characters in the novel live their lives in wake of tragic events? How do we both move on and still remember these events? What roles do stories play in reconciling ourselves with the past?
5. Describe the blending of elements that are tragic and that are comedic in the novel. Why do you think the book does this? What does the book seem to think that the role of humor is in life and in the face of tragic events?

Passage Analysis

Passage Analysis: Due at the end of the semester, Dec. 5

Choose one of the following passages, and write a detailed passage analysis. See your handout for information on how to do this

1. Page 5, beginning with “Grandfather’s name is also Alexander” until the end of the section on page 7.
2. Page 8, beginning of the page, until the end of page 11
3. Page 44, beginning with “Yankel had lost two babies” until the end of page 49
4. Page 64, beginning with “Let us eat” until page 67, ending with “had a thing to do with the potato”
5. Page 95, beginning with “From space” until the end of the section on page 99
6. Page 131, beginning with “She hadn’t cried” until page 135, ending with “the last breath of the drowning victim”

Bonus Assignment: Also due on Dec. 5^th if you choose to this assignment. It will be evaluated out of a possible bonus 3% added to your final grade.

The bonus assignment is a creative writing assignment. You will write a vignette that depicts a moment in one of your grandparents’ lives that demonstrates that you understand Everything is Illuminated’s approach to telling history (i.e. poetic, not strictly “accurate,” or suggesting that history is subjective or cannot fully be known, postmodern rather than realistic, etc.). Write about your grandparent as if he or she is a character: this is a work of fiction, not a work of biography.

Everything is Illuminated, Lesson 6

Lesson 6

Wrapping up: Everything is Illuminated

1. Plot structure

How do you think the structure of this novel is different than a traditional plot structure of introduction, rising action, climax, and resolution?

Where do you think the climax is in this book?

2. Character development

We've talked before about how Alex character changes. How does his grandfather's character change?

a. change in views / treatment of Jewish people

● forces waitress to apologize to Jonathan for calling him a Jew

b. attempt to reconcile himself with his past

● “We are not looking for his grandfather. We are looking for Augustine. She is not any more his than ours” (220)

What is the grandfather looking for?

● “I do not believe in Augustine. No, that is not what I mean. I do not believe in the Augustine that Grandfather was searching for. The woman in the photograph is alive. I am sure she is. But I am also sure that she is not Hershel, as Grandfather wanted her to be, and she is not my grandmother, as he wanted her to be, and she is not Father, as he wanted her to be. If I gave him money, he would have found her, and he would have seen who she is really is, and this would have killed him” (242).

3. The role of fiction

a. We've talked about how this book differs from traditional forms of fiction because it reveals itself as a work of fiction and a work that is in progress rather than complete or finished.

b. The book also thinks about what the role of fiction is in our lives: we all tell stories to ourselves to make sense out of our existence. The creation and revision of stories is a part of life, and the book exposes this through the way it is written: it reveals the creation and revision of its story.

c. Fiction comes out of nothing, but creates something that exists that could produce meaning

● “She told him stories of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad non-truths, even, but he nodded, and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences (230).

● “Safran lay in bed trying to string the events of his seventeen years into a coherent narrative, something that he could understand, with an order of imagery, and intelligibility of symbolism” (260).

d. Another way the novel departs from traditional ways of storytelling is the way in which the way the book is written suggests that writing and language is unable to communicate certain things: this suggests a lack of faith in language to convey meaning

● think about Lyotard's idea of “incredulity towards metanarratives” that we talked about at the beginning of the course

● stream of consciousness style when Grandfather is talking about what happened with Herschel, words are mashed together (248- 250)

● use of .... before Trachimbrod is destroyed as if there is an attempt for the writing style to slow down time (270-271)

● use of parentheses ( ) to include / make things present that were absent from the conversation about Herschel (246)

● end of the novel breaks of midsentence: does not continue on to say what will happened next

● the destruction of Trachimbrod is not part of the actual narrative but is part of someone's dream that is recorded in The Book of Recurrent Dreams (272)

What do all these events that are being described have in common?

4. Collapse of past, present, and future

a. We've talked before about the how the novel confused a clear sense of past coming before the present and present coming before future

b. In the last section of the novel, we have people trapped in the past and unable to move forward in their lives when tragic events are looming

● “Activity was replaced with thought. Memory” (258-263).

5. Impossibility of love

● We saw this theme before with Yankel and with Brod, and we see this theme again with Safran

● I don't love you, he told her one evening as they lay naked in the grass (234).

● Alex response to this is quite insightful (240)

● Eventually, Safran's first experience of love is “by chance” (263) and he is in love with the future

● This experience of being in love is the experience of being caught in an in-between state (261 – 263-264)

6. The title

What does the title of the novel mean? What things are illuminated? What is gained and lost by illumination?

Everything is Illuminated, Lesson 5

Lesson 5

Memory and Legacy in Everything is Illuminated

What are an author's responsibilities towards telling a “truthful” version of the past?

● Alex comments that both he and Jonathan are involved in a process of taking liberties with the past when they are writing. Note that Alex continually raises questions about the role and purpose of writing as the novel goes on

● “We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? The both of us? Do you think that this is acceptable when we are writing about things that occurred? If your answer is no, then why do you write about Trachimbrod and your grandfather in a manner that you do, and why do you command me to be untruthful? If your answer is yes, then this creates another question, which is if we are to be such nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story more premium than life?” (179).

The novel suggests both the importance of recording the past in writing as well as the impossibility of knowing the past through recorded documents:

● Only the various Trachimbroders who weren't, in Tova's estimation, worthy of an invitation were not at the reception, and hence not in the guest book, and hence not included in the last practical census of the shtetl before its destruction, and hence forgotten forever (163).

● He was so afraid of being discovered that even in his journal – the only written record I have of his life before he met my grandmother, in a displaced-persons camp after the war – he never mentions them once ... The day he had sex with his first virgin: Went to the theater today. Too bored to stay through the first act. Drank eight cups of coffee. I thought I was going to burst. Didn't burst. (169- 170).

● If Jonathan has no actual record of his grandfather's sexual escapades, why does he write them?

Can we see his creation of the sexual prowess of his grandfather in a similar way to Alex's own creation of his sex life?

Jonathan on his grandfather’s sex life: “There were some fifty-two virgins, to whom he made love in each of the positions he had studied from a dirty deck of cards...” (195)

Alex on his own sex life: “May girls want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements, notwithstanding the Inebriated Kangaroo, the Gorky Tickle, and the Unyielding Zookeeper” (2)

Yet, there seems to be a desire from the general public to have an “authentic” version of the past, even if this may not be possible:

● Peanut Gallery

“This is so unbelievable. Not at all like it was” (174).

The novel also raises a question concerning whether or not we are determined by our past and the context that we live in. Is these things control our lives, can we be blamed for the things we do?

● “Wasn't everything that had happened, from his first kiss to this, his first marital infidelity, the inevitable result of circumstance over which he had no control? How guilty could he be, when he never had any real choice” (165, 166)

● “They all turned their faces away and hid. I cannot blame them...” (187)

● “Grandfather interrogates me about you every day. He desires to know if you forgive him for the things he told you about the war, and about Herschel. (You could alter it, Jonathan. For him, not for me. Your novel is now verging on the war. It is possible. He is not a bad person. He is a good person, alive in a bad time” (145).

Everything is Illuminated, Lesson 3 and 4

Everything is Illuminated: Lesson 3

1. Lack of linear direction in the plot

● we see this first in when Brod looks through a telescope: “she lifts a powerful telescope to find herself (87) and sees the photograph of Safran and Augustine (88) and learns of her own rape that is recorded in the Book of Antecedents (89).

● when this rape is dealt with later, it only occurs in the space of one line, because we have already learnt about it: “ignored them even when they made a woman out of her” (96). There will be more discussion of this rape later through the technique of flashback, and we will later read the full account of this rape as it is recorded in the Book of Antecedents.

● Brod looking through her telescope into the future is different than traditional foreshadowing or hints about what will come later

● we see more traditional foreshadowing when Jonathan writes “my great-great-great-great-great grandfather swam back to shore, pumping the golden sack above his head” (94). By referring to Shalom (the Kolker) as his ancestor, we know that he will later marry Brod.

So, instead of telling history in a strictly accurate and linear manner, we have more of a poetic or fantastical history that often involves playing around with timelines. History is being told in a postmodern rather than realist manner.

● we certainly see this with the story of Trachimday creating an illumination in the sky 150 years later

● “From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistake for light – a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes ... We're here the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here and we're alive (95- 96)

● Trachimday day light is seen in the moonwalk in 1966 (98).

● collapse of fact / fiction (actual historical events and places with non-accurate and non-realistic elements) as well as a blending of past, present, and future

● “Like Yankel, she repeats things until they are not true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert on confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be (87).

● this blending is also a result of the undetermined nature of the past : can we really know what happened for sure? : “This plaque marks the spot (or a spot close to the spot) where the wagon of one Trachim B (we think) went in” (93).

2. Alex's character: humourous yet also insightful.

● definition of a writer as someone who writes fast (100)

● Jonathan begins to appear as foolish as well (it is not only Alex). He wants certain scenes changed so that he looks better, but this would involve him speaking Ukrainian, and there are some problems in the logic of this change, that Alex points out (101)

● Alex also proves himself to be quite insightful at times: see his remarks and insights into Brod's character and on the nature of love (103), his comments on the lost history of Trachimbrod (115) and lies (117)

● his inflated persona that we saw at the beginning of the novel will later begin to reveal itself as a fabrication: “I have never been carnal with a girl” (144).

● fiction and storytelling is a way to create a persona that one wants for oneself and to please other people: “I think that this is why I relish writing for you so much. It makes it possible for me to be not like I am, but as I desire for Little Igor to see me (144).

● does or can a fictional persona replace or correct the “authentic” self? : “I beseech you to make us better than we are. Make us good” (145).

Everything is Illuminated: Lesson 4

1. Time shifts: Past, present, future

● When we enter into the section entitled “The Dial,” we have suddenly in 1941 with no explanation

● later on, Alex acts as a stand-in for the reader, and expresses some of the confusion that the reader likely feels: “as for your story, I will tell you that I was at first a very perplexed person. Who is this new Safran, and Dial, and who is becoming married? (142). Alex also reminds Jonathan of his historical inaccuracies about the saw (142). Keep in mind that Jonathan is not aiming to be historically “accurate.”

● this change in time undermines or compromises the climax of finding Augustine (?) at the end of the previous section (118) – the reader likely expects to hear more about this but Foer holds off on following through with the expectations that he has created

● we are learning about Safran (Jonathan's grandfather and his wedding), and through a flashback (?) we learn about the Kolker's accident (“He was to fulfill the sacred ritual that had been fulfilled by every married man in Trachimbrod since his great-great-great-grandfather's tragic flour mill accident” (120). We haven't learnt about this accident yet, so is this flashback actually an example of foreshadowing? --- confusion of clear forward and backward motion along a linear plot

● Brod's rape is finally clarified for us: “She hadn't cried since that Trachimday five years before, when on the way home from the float she was stopped by the mad squire Sofiowka N, who made a woman of her” (131). (this is a clear flashback, but the event itself was first introduced to us in a bizarre twist on foreshadowing)

● The face of the Kolker gets remade as it gets rubbed off. It gets remade in accordance with what his offspring look like: the present creates what past: “For each recasting, the craftsmen modeled the Dial's face after the faces of his male descendants – reverse heredity” (140)

● this negates the previous idea that Safran is falling in his ancestor's footsteps: “he was growing into his place in the family, he looked unmistakably like his father's father's father's father ... he was granted a place in a long line – certain assurances of being and permanence, but also a burdensome restriction of movement. He was not altogether free (121).

● Alex: “everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was” (145)

● the past and the present seem to be connected together in a chain: “ so my young grandfather knelt - a perfectly unique link in a perfectly uniform chain – almost 150 years after his Brod saw the Kolker illuminated at her window” (140), but which end of the chain is the beginning or the starting point???

2. The nature of love

● how is love being defined in the novel?

● Brod's love for her father, and love in general: “Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest and the same time. She felt as if she was brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release ... she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love – loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about” (79- 80)

● Brod's love for the Kolker : “This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even than you love his presence? (121).

● Brod wants to be loved like a child is loved: she does not want serious discussions or other intellectual matters: (123, 125). What does she want? Does she want a partner in life?

● She thinks violence is love: 129-130

● impossibility of love at all: 132

● love seems to be possiible in the light of unpleasant truths, and this is connected to time stopping: “He pressed his lips to the hole: Yankel was not your real father. The minutes were unstrung. They fell to the floor and rolled through the house, losing themselves. I love you, she said, and for the first time in her life, the words had meaning” (139).

● lies and deception, though, seem to play important roles and are sometimes necessary (though they may hurt the liar or the ones they lie to): “not-truths hung in front of me like fruit. Which could I pick for the hero? Which could I pick for Grandfather? Which for myself?” (117).

● is humor the only truthful way to tell a story (Alex on p 53) or does humor lessen reality and protect us from reality by allowing us to distance ourselves from it? “I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is … But now I think it's the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world” (158).

● is Yankel himself able to tell unpleasant truths to his daughter? (77)

More dualities: (track these through the novel)

● the Kolker's split personality and split head

● absence / presence:

● “This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even than you love his presence?” (121).

● “They lived with the hole. The absence that defined it became a presence that defined them” (135).

● “She was learning [that the hole] is not the exception in life, but the rule. The hole is no void; the void exists around it” (139).

Everything is Illuminated, Lesson 2

Everything is Illuminated: Lesson 2

1. The sections entitled “Falling in Love” (“Falling in Love, 1791-1796” p 43-49 and “Falling in Love, 1791-1803” p 75-85) describe Yankel and his daughter’s love for one another. Describe each of these characters and their expressions of love. What themes emerge out of these sections?

2. When Alex writes about Jonathan’s corrections to his part of the story in “An Overture to Encountering the Hero, and then Encountering the Hero” (p 26-34), he comments: “I know that you asked me not to alter the mistakes becomes they sound humorous, and humorous is the only way to tell a sad story, but I think I will alter them. Please do not hate me. I did fashion all of the other corrections you commanded. I inserted what you ordered me to in the part about when I first encountered you … As you commanded, I removed the sentence “He was severely short,” and inserted in its place, “Like me, he was not tall.” And after the sentence “Oh, Grandfather said, and I perceived that he was still departing from a dream,” I added, as you commanded, “About grandmother” (53).

Why do you think that Jonathan has asked Alex to make (or not make) these types of corrections? How would you describe the humor in the novel? How does it relate to tragedy? What are your feelings about using humor in a novel that deals with the Holocaust?

3. When writing about the section that he is sending to Jonathan entitled “Going Forth to Lutsk,” Alex comments “I also invented things that I thought would appease you, funny things and sad things” (54). What things do you think have been invented in this section?

4. Look at the Alex’s comments to Jonathan about being a writer on page 69. How does each character think about the role of the writer? What kind of role of the writer is Foer suggesting in his text?

Everything is Illuminated, Lesson 1

Everything is Illuminated

Lesson 1

1. Looking at Alex’s character

1. Foer attempts to create humour through Alex’s use of the English language. This happens when Alex chooses a word that may be the correct definition but not commonly used (resulting in a humourous sense of formality), when Alex almost has a colloquial expression but not quite, and when he ironically understates something through his choice of words. Find examples of these areas.

Formal word choices

· Dubs

· Disseminating

· Miniature

· Pygmy allowance

· Sired

· Tally

Almost there, but not quite

· Fluid in English

· “I knew that he was pissing off, pissing everywhere” (30)

· “I wore my peerless blue jeans to oppress the hero” (31).

Idiomatic Expressions

• “my instructor was having shit between his brains” (2)
• “made shit of a brick” (28)

Ironic understatements

• “mismanagement with a brick wall” (1)
• “home for forgetful dogs” (5)
• “my face gave a high-five to the front window” (30)

2. Describe Alex’s character. What are his interests? Where does he reveal that certain things in the persona that he creates are not true? How does he characterize Jonathan? What kind of advice does Jonathan give Alex about writing?

a. Alex’s character and interests:

b. Self-consciousness in his storytelling

“This is where the story begins” (3)

“I will describe my eyes and then begin the story” (4).

Desire to have some things excluded from the final draft, usually in parenthetical remarks: it appears that we are reading the first draft

“Jonathan, this part about grandfather must remain amid you and me, yes?” (5)

“At the same time when he said this, it seemed a reasonable thing to say. But now how does this make you feel, Jonathan, in the luminescence of everything that occurred” (6).

Alex creates a certain persona in his writing. At times, he either reveals parts of this persona that are false by making overblown comments that we know are false. At other times, though, Alex has great insight into situations and into Jonathan’s writing

• On 69 position:

“It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor” (3)

• On his height:

“And thank you, I feel indebted to utter, for not mentioning the not-truth about how tall I am. I thought it might appear superior if I was tall” (24).

• On how fast he can run:

“the car is so much shit that it would not travel any faster than as fast as I could run, which is sixty kilometers per the hour” (29).

• On the history of Lvov:

“Lvov is a city like New York City in America. New York City, in truth, was designed on the model of Lvov” (30).

Alex’s characterization of Jonathan

• Alex calls Jonathan “the hero” of the story? What is a hero? Is Jonathan a hero?
• See description of Jonathan on page 31-32

What kind of advice does Jonathan give Alex?

• Use of thesaurus p 23

• His reaction to advice that Jonathan gives:

“I apologize for the last line, about how you are a very spoiled Jew. It has been changed, and is now written, “I do not want to drive ten hours to an ugly city to attend to a spoiled Jew” (24).

• Why does Foer choose to open the book with Alex, instead of with the persona of the himself? How does this affect the authority of the author?

2. Looking at the history of Trachimbrod

1. What kinds of divisions where created in the Jewish community in Trachimbrod?

• Creation of the division between Upright Synagogue and Slouching Syagogue pg.17-18
• Need for proclamation pg. 13

2. Jonathan is engaged in telling a history attempts to be more poetic and magical than strictly historical. Where do you see examples of this “poetic” type of history, or of recounting things that do not seem like they would be in a traditional historical account of a town? What parts of his text suggest to us that history can be told from a number of perspectives, and that being strictly “accurate” is impossible?

• Poeticizing of history: travel of stench pg 22
• Many possible versions of what happened with Trachim p 15

3. When Alex reads the section of history that Jonathan has written entitled “The Beginning of the World Comes Often,” he comments “I have one small query about this section, which is do you know many of the names you exploit are not truthful names for Ukraine? …. Are you being a humourous writer here, or an uninformed one?” (25). What is your opinion about this question? Why would Foer be a purposely “uninformed” writer?