The Representation of Trauma via Remediation: Digitality in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Print Novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

This article addresses the question of how the contemporary novel evolved, modified, and adjusted to media-rich environments and how it engaged in confabulation with electronic textuality. This inquiry is part of a larger study that recognizes an interdependent exchange of literature and other media, which complement one another in a dynamic and vitalizing process of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 11) while emphasizing intermedial reflexivity from screen to paper. The focus of this study is on the influence of the digital culture on print media in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close(2005), in which the author experiments with printed textuality by incorporating the textual, the visual, the graphic, and even the kinetic by using digital affordances that are possible in print. The paper argues that as the mediums in Foers’s novel interpenetrate in a synergistic interplay between language, visual elements, and codes, they capture the unspeakability of trauma. To this end, it explores intricate ways in which attention-grabbing reproductions of photographs,unconventional typesetting,and other graphic devices made possible via digital technologies augment the comprehension of trauma tied to the 9/11 catastrophe recounted in the novel.