Delve Readers Seminar: New York City: Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer

Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer are two contemporary authors who have explored New York City not only as a space where a person works, transits, and lives, but more as a symbolic space at a certain time that interacts with the fictional characters as if the city were also one of them—a living entity that actively affects the fates and actions of every person that inhabits it. Memory, chance, the double, and disobedience as a way to dig into the self are the literary elements that trigger the plots constructed by these two authors.

In this Delve seminar we’ll discuss Auster’s Leviathan (1992), and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). We will compare how each author recreates New York as a fictional place, not far apart in time, but radically different in many ways, due to the historical events that shaped the city and the relations among its dwellers.

Delve Access Program
We want Delve seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. We are happy to offer an Access Program which provides reduced tuition to qualifying participants. Most Delves have at least one access spot available. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you would like to take a Delve at the Access Rate.

Graphic designer, writer, translator, and photographer, Ivonne Saed has extensively explored the crossroads between the visual and the textual, both in her creative work and in teaching. She is the author of the novel Triple crónica de un nombre (Lectorum, 2003) and the non-fiction Sobre Paul Auster: Autoría, distopía y textualidad (Lectorum, 2009). She co-authored Literatura: imaginación, identidad y poder, Vampiros transmundanos y tan urbanos, and ¡Madres! Cuentos (y precauciones) de maternidad. Saed has published book reviews, short fiction and photos in periodicals like Reforma and Crónica (Mexico), Literal Magazine (US), and Arquivo Maaraví (Brazil). Her documentary Naïve premiered in 2011 as part of Object Stories, a Portland Art Museum project, and she produced Vida Sefaradí: A Century of Sephardic Life in Portland. Saed has taught at Marylhurst University, Oregon State University and Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico), and she’s been a Delve Seminar guide for Literary Arts, in Portland, Oregon, since 2011. Her work has been discussed by academics in a number of publications and it has been staged by Jewish Theatre Collaborative (Portland) and Jewish Women’s Theatre (Los Angeles).

Purchase Triple crónica de un nombre from Annie Bloom’s Books, one of our Portland-based, independent bookstore partners HERE.