Foer to give 2010 Gifford Lecture

Junot Diaz, George Saunders and Michael Ondaatje are just a few of the highly-decorated authors who have visited Vassar College to give the annual Gifford Lecture, established to celebrate the craft of writing. This year, the Gifford Lecture will be given by possibly the most eminent author yet: Jonathan Safran Foer.

Foer is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. His lecture next Monday will include readings from these highly-acclaimed novels, while also touching on his writing style and history.

The 33-year-old author is a native of Washington D.C., where he attended Georgetown Day School. At the age of eight, Foer experienced one of his life's defining moments when he was involved in a chemistry explosion at a summer program, leaving him and his friends with secondary burns. To this day, he retains a vivid mental image of his best friend's bloodied face.

His second book's title, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), refers to this scarring experience. The novel explores the life of a nine-year-old boy, Oskar Schell, who loses his father on Sept. 11. and goes on a powerful journey of discovery as he uncovers pieces of his father's past.

"He pulled off something miraculous with this young boy as the narrator," said Professor of English and Chair of the Lecture Committee Ronald Sharp. "It's a very risky thing to do, but he did an amazing job with it. There were a couple of places in the novel where I literally had to put the book down and sort of shake my head and say, ‘Look what he's done.'"

Professor of English Amitava Kumar, who will introduce Foer at the lecture, has used the book in his Sept. 11 English course and finds Extremely Loud unique amongst other pieces of Sept. 11 literature.

"Several American writers made the mistake of imagining they were in the terrorists' minds," said Kumar. "His book was different, because it didn't make that misstep. Instead it was from the viewpoint of a child, who is trying to come to grips with the trauma of Sept. 11. In that way it is quite special."

Foer's first novel, Everything is Illuminated, takes readers on a similar journey of discovery. For his senior thesis at Princeton, Foer analyzed the life of his Holocaust-surviving grandfather, Louis Safran, for which he won Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Prize. After graduating he traveled to the Ukraine, where he expanded his thesis into what would become his first novel. Foer takes the reader on a journey through Ukraine, where the protagonist searches for the woman who saved his grandfather's life during World War II. The novel was released to universal acclaim.

"He wrote the first book when he was only 25," said Sharp. "Think about that in terms of a Vassar career, somebody taking a creative writing course and three years later producing this absolutely staggering novel. He is an enormously talented guy."

Foer has a unique way of physically approaching his novels. In Extremely Loud he integrated pictures heavily throughout the novel, with the last 15 pages acting as a flipbook of a man falling in reverse from the top of the World Trade Center. In his new book, he takes the novel The Street of Crocodile by Bruno Schulz, and die-cuts it, leaving entire chunks of the book missing.

Kumar is thoroughly enamored by this style of authorship. "Architecturally it's a new thing. He treats books as imaginative objects and he produces new things out of them…that is what I am most interested in talking to people about: how he seeks imaginative responses from us and how he is one of the main practitioners of that art right now."

In addition to his works of fiction, Foer has also forayed into non-fiction writing. After visiting both small organic and large industrial farms, Foer wrote about the mistreatment of animals and the dangers of consuming meat in Eating Animals. This book has elicited strong reactions, even from celebrities. Said Natalie Portman in an op-ed in The Huffington Post, "Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals changed me from a 20-year vegetarian to a vegan activist." The book is written less from an investigative-journalist's perspective and more as a memoir, with art and a variety of essays interjected throughout.

The Vassar community is eagerly awaiting the arrival of this prodigious author. "I have been interested to see that an awful lot of students, at least in my classes, both my freshman writing seminar and my Australian literature class, have read at least one and in some cases both of his novels. I think there is a lot of interest in him at Vassar both among faculty and students," said Sharp.

Foer's Gifford Lecture will occur on Monday, Nov. 22, at 5:30 p.m. in the second floor of the Students' Building.