For my final paper I plan to look at Jonathan Safran Foer’s most recent work, Tree of Codes. Foer is a pretty notable author, but strangely Tree of Codes doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. If you want to know more about it, your best bet is to look at some of the descriptions on sites like Amazon–I discovered the book because my boyfriend is a huge JSF fan and bought it when it was first released, but I think copies of this book are actually pretty hard to come by and fairly expensive (for a college student). But basically it’s a cut-up novel taken from Foer’s favorite novel of all time, Street of Crocodiles by deceased Polish author Bruno Schulz. Foer took Schulz’s novel and literally cut it up using the die-cut method, creating his own text. I haven’t read either of the books so that’s mainly what I’ll be doing for the next week, and I’m interested in looking at Foer’s authorship versus Schulz’s, and how the physical book itself challenges or adds to some of the conceptions of “books” that we’ve been considering in this class. For example, I’ve been reading some of the interviews Foer did to promote the book, and he often talks about it as if it were a work of art or a sculpture instead of an actual novel. Is Tree of Codes really a book at all, or just a piece of visual art? What’s the difference, and where should we draw the line? What makes it different from Street of Crocodiles, and what makes it its own text? (Foer himself has stated in interviews that he believes himself to be the author of this book, and NOT Schulz). The book itself reminds me a lot of some of the artists’ books we talked about earlier in the semester, and I’m hoping our conversation on Nox next week will give me some more insights I can discuss in my paper.