Juxtaposing the Dresden Bombing and 9/11: Acting out and Working through the Trauma in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Abstract

The thesis discusses the acting out and the working through of the trauma in Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The focus of the thesis would be the author’s treatments of 1) the juxtaposition of 9/11 and the Dresden Bombing; 2) the representations of trauma through visual and typographical devices; and 3) the child as the first-person narrator of 9/11. The thesis contains five parts. The Introduction first contextualizes Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close within the emergence of post-9/11 literature and then addresses the necessity of making sense of 9/11 under the lens of trauma. Chapter 1 discusses the historical context of the Dresden Bombing within which the grandparents’ fictional accounts are situated. For the grandparents, the repressed war trauma not only haunts them with a devastating impact but also makes their present life impossible. Chapter 2 starts with the politics of 9/11. Then, it centers on how Oskar, the child narrator, and other characters react to this trauma. Chapter 3 deals with the working through of the trauma. The Conclusion restates my arguments and affirms Foer’s treatment of juxtaposing 9/11 with the Dresden Bombing, which complicates the acting out and the working through of the trauma. More importantly, Foer’s novel opens another perspective among post-9/11 literature.

Date of Award	2012
Original language	English
Supervisor	Pei-Chen Liao (Supervisor)