Incredibly close encounters : magical realism and the intimate elegies of Jonathan Safran Foer’s everything is illuminated and extremely loud and incredibly close

<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px">This paper will investigate the relationship between prose elegy and magical realism in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Everything is Illuminated </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close</i>. It will propose that absence is generative, and that the state of melancholia—or unsuccessful, unresolved grief—is conducive to creativity.</span><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-justify: inter-ideograph; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%; margin: 0cm 0cm 6pt 36pt"><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 11pt"> <br /><o:p></o:p></span></p><!--EndFragment-->