Enhancing the Print Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

As Mark Z. Danielewski’s (2000) House of Leaves gained recognition and literary experimentation was starting to be seen as more than a gimmick, the release of Jonathan Safran Foer’s (2005a) Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close demonstrated the novel’s reflexivity in response to the 9/11 events and its capacity for adaptability in the changing media landscape of the early twenty-first century. The creative integration of photography in Safran Foer’s text allowed the literary form of the novel to creatively engage with the rising dominance of visual culture while the print format in which the text was conceptualized and released, emphasized the key position of the printed book as a contemporary cultural product. In the context of multimodal fiction, I consider Safran Foer’s novel to have marked a critical juncture toward the development of the genre, as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close consolidates the opening of literary possibilities articulated by House of Leaves, forms a second stepping stone for the subsequent development of the field, and allows a lineage of multimodal literary texts to be recognized. This chapter situates Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close in the early stages of the genre’s chronological unfolding and focuses on how Safran Foer’s novel interrogates established textual borders in literary fiction and manipulates photography as a strategy of building narrative content.