Hey guys!

So as you know from last week’s blog post, we just finished the book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. This week we followed our usual ASTU protocol and read a couple of journal articles that pertain to the novel. First we read ‘Regarding the Pain of Self and Other: Trauma Transfer and Narrative Framing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ by Ilka Saal, and then we read “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” (Frames of was: when is life grievable?) by Judith Butler.

Just a quick side note: In class today Dr. Luger explained to us that if Foer is our primary source, then Saal would be our secondary source or textual analysis of Foer’s novel, and Butler’s article would provide us with our lens.

Though I found Butler’s article to be a bit dense and hard to understand at times, there were a few points that could not be mistaken. For instance, early on she writes “If I identify a community of belonging on the basis of nation, territory, language, or culture, and if I then base my sense of responsibility on that community, I implicitly hold to the view that I am responsible only for those who are recognizable to me in some way” (Butler 36). Through this she is explaining that we often only care about the lives of those in which we consider to be apart of our “community”. In class we talk and read a lot about the distinction that many people make between “the us” and “the them”. I find that this passage from Butler’s argument really solidifies that idea.

Another passage that I felt really stood out reads “public grieving was dedicated to making these images iconic for the nation, which meant of course that there was considerably less public grieving for non-US nationals, and none at all for illegal workers” (Butler 38). This struck me as important. I hadn’t considered the fact that there were many people lost in 9/11 who American’s didn’t really mourn.

As I was only five old on September 11, 2001 I wasn’t old enough to understand what was going on, and I have no real memories of that day, and anything I know about it I learned through school, American media, and American adults. Because of this the idea that there were many people killed on that horrible day that were never grieved by my country was never mentioned, or considered. I reading Butler’s article I found the idea so upsetting in tragic.

http://www.911memorial.org/explore-memorial

Oh, and one more side note. You might not be able to read this, but when I was searching for an image of the 9/11 memorial I typed in “9/11” and one of the first things that came up was “9/11 jokes”…. I just thought that was completely messed up, and I wanted to share it with you guys.

Thanks for reading this week!

Olivea