Hello fellow classmates,

Throughout the last few weeks we’ve been focusing on the novel “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer, delving into both its literary features as well as its applicable scholarly themes. Of note we’ve been talking a lot about fear, trauma, and all sorts of concepts that stem from all kinds of awful events.

As everyone in class should be familiar with, we’ve explored the work of Ilka Saal who wrote about “trauma transfer”, and just last week we discussed the first chapter of theorist Judith Butler’s book “Frames of War”. Having a fair deal of reading as we got started, we recently spent a lot of our time going through essential ideas within the texts: the “us vs them” mentality, the frames in which we understand stimuli, who is responsible for who/what, as well as the value of a life (or even a death).

One of our central topics is started off by Kaveel, who likens the interpretive frames of Butler to the interpretive communities of Shahzad. However, unlike the positives which Shahzad emphasises in her education-based article, Butler explains that the frames can be negative instead. Carolina briefly addresses this idea, explaining how the news exploited people to go out and purchase goods to curb their fears. Kaveel mentions that these frames can be manipulated in ways that affect the knowledge of the population using the example of exceptionalism in America. He says, “We certainly are blinded and disregard the lives lost by the perceived ‘enemies’ however if one of ‘our me’ dies it’s an event which is heavily grieved.”

This idea that frames of interpretation can begin to cause greater divide leads directly into the heavily discussed topic of “us and them”. As Kendall points out, the idea behind this divide is linked to the idea of a sort of social responsibility. “Am I responsible for all others, or only to some, and on what basis would I draw that line?” (Butler, 35). She explains how the concept is troubling even if it seems entirely natural to create a separation in order to facilitate identity and roles within societies. Kendall expressed a fascination with the idea of the mutual vulnerability of all humans, that by understanding how our existence is facilitated by the existence of other separated yet relatable humans, we may be able to shrink the necessary gap.

Continuing with our discussion of us and them, the aspect of value was explored by many of us in the class. Sania questions why certain groups of people are given greater attention and value within the media, going further to question why classifications like social class and race are still primary measures of worth within the world. She uses the example of the Paris attack vs many other incidents which received minimal news coverage. Nico uses a similar example, where the Charlie Hebdo shooting seemed to heavily overshadow the massacre which occurred in Baga, Nigeria around the same time.

Taylor relates this theme to Foer’s novel, recapping how Oskar felt so strongly for the death of his father in 9/11, yet gave a non-empathetic class presentation about the bombings of Japan of World War II. All of these examples can be summed up in one of Butler’s conclusions as explained by Kihan. “The extent to which we recognise ourselves in other people … leads us to mourn for them.” Since the frames presented to us by the media, our communities and other voices of authority lead us to create and further the divide between the conceived “us” and “them”, people become unable to see outside of the given frames and realise that there are many other similarities that aren’t explicit from their current perspective. This leads to a vast difference in which people are deemed valuable in both life and death, and those who are ‘never counted as a life at all.” (Butler 38).

All in all, the difficulty and subject matter of Butler’s writing has been highly pivotal in our process of critically analysing the concepts of Foer’s novel, as well as real life examples that we’ve seen in the blogs of last week. Just like Professor Luger said in class, it may have been difficult to get started, but going through it has proved very insightful.

Have a good week.