Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) Ferrell 2012-13

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) Ferrell 2012-13

Jonathan Safran Foer

This is a book about questions. Many of these questions do not have answers.

This is a book about puzzles. Many of these puzzles do not fit neatly into themselves.

This is a book about grief. Many of these characters live side by side with grief in every moment of their lives.

This is a book about hope and healing, about family, and the difficulty we have of expressing deep emotion.

This is a book about balances between humour and tragedy, destruction and invention, something and nothing, life and death.

Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer explains why imagined stories create real world ripples

Jonathan Safron Foer was in New York on September 11 2001. He was sleeping off jet lag after returning to the city from a three-month trip to Spain, delighted to be home again, seeing familiar places and sleeping in his own bed. Then he was awakened by a phone call from a friend: “He said, ‘You have to turn on the TV, a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.’ And he said, ‘I think it’s going to be a very strange day’.” So 9/11 becomes the background for the pattern of this novel.

He says, “I’ve tried to write a book I would want to read rather than I book I would want to write.”

Foer cites a conversation he had with one of his favorite writers, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. “He said: ‘What every novel is about always is examining the details of an individual’s life, and whether you are talking about the individual in the middle of war or pouring a cup of coffee. It’s an equally important task. Because what it always ends up doing is showing us both how similar people are to one another, and how different they are from one another – and those two things are what allow for conversation and peace.’

“So I feel like one of the reasons that I write is because the world is now so accustomed to using these capital-letter words, like America or Fundamentalism or Justice, things that speak on behalf of many things. Literature is an opportunity to use lower-case words and examine specifics and the irony is that when you examine specifics, you sometimes end up being able to say much more – about loss, about destruction, about war.” (Agree? Disagree?)

Foer says that the challenges of writing in a child’s voice are not really challenging for him. “It’s not the voice of the child exactly. There’s this funny property of fiction that in order to create this thing that feels most real, it’s usually not by actually giving the most accurate presentation of it. If I were to tape record a nine-year-old talking and transcribe it, I have a feeling that it would not necessarily work so well. It’s an incredibly strange thing the more I think about it – a lot of the time you have to tell insane lies in order to express truth.” (Hmmmm. Ask Flannery O’Connor about that.)

He compares it to the idea of throwing a non-existent pebble into a pond, and getting real ripples in the water. “When you write a book it’s not a real thing, but the ripples are real. I’ve read books that have literally changed my life – my moral sense is different, my sense of humor is different. These things have very real implications for the rest of the world. I treat people differently. I spend my money differently. All because of these non-existent rocks that were thrown into a lake.”

So let’s see what kind of non-existent rocks you can make that will ripple out from your having read this book.

THE ROCK Project: Due date to be assigned

Completed by December 10

The project is wonderfully puzzling for me. I want it to be your personal reaction to the literature itself. I want it to be personally yours. Some kind of artistic comment on the art of literature. See the puzzle? I would suggest that you keep a journal with your book so that you can record possibilities as you move through your reading. Cool.

Foer says that it does not matter to him how you interpret the book or how you make meaning out if it for yourself – you may go wherever you choose with it and meaning. What he wants is for it to matter to you. He wants you to go back to it in your thinking and go get it off the bookshelf again and again. So I want your product to matter to you, which is impossible for me to define. Now if the thing that matters the most to you is a grade, then you are missing the point, and your grade will most likely disappoint you. See the grade as a by-product of hard work and creative thought. The grade will happen naturally if you do the work in a way that matters to you. Plus I am very curious to see what matters to you as a young person in the 21st century on the edge of the biggest transition of your life.

After you have completed the reading, I will meet with you to get a sense of what you are working on. That doesn’t mean that your thought won’t change as you work; it just means that I understand what you are planning and how I can “grade” you on that. Maybe you and I can determine that together?

Remember what Joseph Conrad said:

“But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom . . . He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to that sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – and to the innumerable hearts. . . which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and living to the unborn.”

Requirements:

1.  Art – not your own unless you want to create original art

2.  Connected poetry – not your own unless you want to create poetry

3.  Music – not your own unless you want to write music

4.  Evidence of creativity

5.  Evidence of effort

6.  Evidence of knowledge of the book

7.  Other things?

Possible Vehicles for Delivering Product?

-  Video

-  Powerpoint

-  Scrapbook/Journal

-  Prezi

-  CD

-  Other?

-  Blog?

-  Discussion board?

-  Webpage?