Postmodernism in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Around the time of the novels publication in the late 1960s, a new literary genre had begun to surface: New Journalism. New Journalism sought to combine the elements of news writing and journalism with the elements of fiction writing. Described as being a form of literature that “engages and excites”, it sought to challenge its readers not only “emotionally” but also “intellectually”. Typically, New Journalism consists of four major characteristics such as

The Multi-Genre Paper is the highlight of my junior year of high school, if not my entire highschool career. It’s composed of many genres; each piece, self-contained, making a point of its own, yet connected to the same topic. My paper about Dr. Seuss, representing the most significant events in his life. Moreover, this project had a very rich context due to its involvement of the skills I’ve gained in school and my childhood memories of Dr. Seuss’ books. My experience throughout this project has enriched my knowledge and expanded my skills. Therefore, it reflects the sponsors of literacy that enabled me to become literate.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster is a book that explains there is more to literature than just a few words on a paper or a few pages in a book. Thomas Foster’s book portrays a relatable message to a wide based audience. This book is relatable for two reasons, the way it is written and the examples it uses. The book is written in a conversational manner, as if the reader was in a group discussion about books and writing. As for the examples, they are informative, descriptive, relative, and entertaining.

When I took off the top to that white box on that calm Sunday night, I was instantly transported into this astounding library, that seemed to come out of a movie scene, rows upon rows were piled up with Verne’s, Dumas’, Stevenson’s, and Melville’s. Each week I would open this box and choose a new book. It wasn’t long until weeks turned to days, and I began to greedily treasure my Stevenson’s, truly value friendship with Dumas, prepare for an adrenaline rush with Verne, but most importantly, it was my single Melville that brought me the pinnacle of happiness.

Lucy Deadman explores the existence of archetypes across all literary text types and how they revisit from our childhood by pressing replay in our lives.

Literature changed drastically between the nineteenth-century and twentieth and twenty-first century. Idealistic views that British writers once held, turned into skepticism as Great Britain enter war and inequalities grew greater. The writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries wrote realistically what was happening in the world. The Moment before the Gun Went Off by Nadine Gordimer and “The Day They Burned the Books” by Jean Rhys are both stories that show the shattering of Idealism in twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In the fourth chapter of Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster addresses the complex network of relationships amongst literary works. These relationships are further defined as intertextuality, “the ongoing interaction between poems or stories” (29). The idea of intertextuality is that no text is “wholly original” (24). Every composition in literature is a blend of previous writings, directly or indirectly conveying ideas from other published literary works. As a result of literature growing from previous literature, authors can use already established concepts to communicate their views to the reader. Foster emphasises in this chapter the importance of familiarity and pattern recognition. Because intertextuality

Kennedy, X.J. and Dana Gioia. Literature: an Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. New York: Pearson Longman, 2010.

Jean Brant used all the basic features of the genre in her essay. At first, this essay was a well-told

The narrative of the book is also significant as a part of its being a postmodernist novel. He does not focus on one single plot or a character and writes a straight story. From point to point voices of the characters jump into or out of the plot, as if they have their own will other than the narrator?s. One of the consequences of this kind of narration is the unmediated use of the dialogues. The dialogues are given without any markers. The reader has to figure out for him- or herself who "speaks," who it is that one is reading (or "listening to"):

As the era of literature slowly declines, the expert critiques and praise for literature are lost. Previously, novels were bursting at the seams with metaphors, symbolism, and themes. In current times, “novels” are simply short stories that have been elaborated on with basic plot elements that attempt to make the story more interesting. Instead of having expert critical analysis written about them, they will, most likely, never see that, as recent novels have nothing to analyze. Even books are beginning to collect dust, hidden away and forgotten, attributing to the rise of companies such as Spark Notes. An author deserves to have his work praised, no matter how meager and the masses should have the right to embrace it or to reject it. As

After finishing the novel, it hit me that Oskar has been going on a journey to find closure with his father, only to find out that he can never get the ideal closure he wants. Since the reality is that his dad died suddenly, there is no mystery to be solved about his father’s death. However, Oskar pushes this aside to block his mind from what has actually happened to his father, which opened up my mind to the reasoning behind Oskar’s whole journey, allowing me to create this

Sitting at a table I imagined my final piece being read by the professor whose opinion of it would count the most, and I imagined him at first being amazed at my writing, but then I remembered that my writing would not be capable of amazing anyone because time is never plentiful enough, so I imagined him just being pleased with my work; and it is at this thought that I got up to look around at the shelved books nearby to my seat and started thumbing through them to see what I could see—because it is the way of men with too little time to look for inspiration wherever it can be found to somehow slow down time or, better yet, speed up their productivity. The genre of those books entirely consisted of the type that one refers to when he or she is lacking the skills to create a delicious meal on his or her own, the kind of book the library I was in is claimed to contain more of than any other library. There was one book, though, that stood out from the rest, so I took it from the shelf and turned it over in my hands to find the title, but there was no title, and in fact there was no writing in the first few pages to pronounce the title or author of it. It was not until I got to the sixth or eighth page that I found any writing, and it said: The Two Lost Tales About the Valiant Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha. One cannot express the

To categorise texts, allows us to view the world from another perspective, and make sense of the world. This is the function of genre. This allows the responder to class texts even further into sub genres, which have conventions they follow to. Such as Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ can be classified into the genre of crime, yet can also be interpreted to fit the conventions of detective crime writing, and mystery. This is made possible through Poe’s utilisation of devices used in mystery and detective novels such as red herrings and denouement.

White Noise is a post-modernist novel that follows the life of a man named Jack and his family as they experience various events in their lives. In the novel, names are simulacra, both of which are viewpoints in which characters interpret and navigate the world around them. But there are many instances in the book where having unchanging or specific names or, in other words, simulacra have presented problems for various characters in the book. Likewise, having views that are too placid will also cause issues. Fortunately, White Noise does offer a solution to both of these conundrums. White Noise teaches readers that although it is perfectly fine to have one’s version of reality that is stable, it is crucial to remain flexible and fluid enough so that in times that version of reality does not match up with what one is experiencing, one will be able to easily modify it.