Our group was fortunate in the line up of projects with book subjects. It’s actually a lot more difficult to pinpoint projects that did not lend themselves to highlighting and analyzing thematic aspects of their literary counterparts. Specifically, I’d like to explore how the following projects worked and did not: House of Leaves as a […]
Over the course of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, there was one fantastical element that jumped out at me. Oskar sends letters to Stephen Hawking, getting a generic form letter in response. However, towards the end of the novel, Oskar finally receives a personal response from Hawking. The question that immediately came to my mind […]
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is a book about tragedy. After all, it is set against the back drop of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th, 2001. However, a question came to my mind when reading this book. There was a part of me that wondered why this book is so sad, why […]
I’d like to address Oskar’s mental status in terms of more than just grief. Grief, grief, good grief! It’s so overwhelming, it might actually blanket some other very serious aspects of Oskar’s character. For instance, I’d like to argue that Oskar has autism. Since he is highly functional, it might be more realistic to assume […]
If you’re like me, you probably wondered about a few scenes in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, specifically the scenes where Oskar asks to kiss a much older woman. You also probably wondered why Abbey said she would kiss with Oskar towards the end of the novel as well as why Anna and Oskar’s […]
I was about to contribute to in-class discussion when Professor Rybak took the wind from my sails and basically iterated what I’d been thinking about but hadn’t yet gotten a chance to vocalize. What kind of parent leaves a 9 year old unsupervised to wander around New York of his own volition? Even if that […]
The question was asked whether ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ succeeds as an experimental work? Firstly, let’s think about that word ‘experimental.’ www.Thesaurus.com gives the definition: Main Entry: experimental [ik-sper-uh-men-tl] Show IPA/ɪkˌspɛrəˈmɛntl/ Show Spelled Part of Speech: adjective Definition: exploratory Synonyms: beginning, developmental, empirical, experiential, first stage, laboratory, momentary, on approval, pilot, preliminary, preparatory, primary, probationary, provisional, […]
While reading A Visit From the Goon Squad I couldn’t help but be reminded of the idea of six degrees of separation. This theory was first started by Frigyes Karinthy and it stated that everybody in the world is connected through six or fewer steps essentially making it the “friend of a friend of a friend” […]
aside from always wanting to start a conversation that way, I’m pretty sure it is human nature to codify, to seek meaning, to group things together in order to make sense of the world. Someone told me once (a moderately credible source, if you care) that if we didn’t create some… compartments, shall […]