Understanding David Foster Wallace

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Understanding David Foster Wallace

Author : Marshall Boswell
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643360701
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (433 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding David Foster Wallace by : Marshall Boswell

Download or read book Understanding David Foster Wallace written by Marshall Boswell and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction—namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The Pale King. Tracing Wallace's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, this volume provides close readings of all his major works of fiction. Although critics sometimes label Wallace a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. In charting a new direction for literary practice, Wallace does not seek to overturn postmodernism, nor does he call for a return to modernism. Rather his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back. Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism, yet it does so in a way that is comprehensible to a wide and general readership—the very same readership that has enthusiastically embraced Wallace's challenging yet entertaining and redemptive fiction.

A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies

Author : M. Boswell
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137078340
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (37 download)

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Book Synopsis A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies by : M. Boswell

Download or read book A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies written by M. Boswell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-03-20 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criticism of the work of David Foster Wallace has tended to be atomistic, focusing on a single aspect of individual works. A Companion to the Work of David Foster Wa ll ace is designed as a professional study of all of Wallace's creative work. This volume includes both thematic essays and focused examinations of each of his major works of fiction.

David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form

Author : David Hering
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1628920572
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (289 download)

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Book Synopsis David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form by : David Hering

Download or read book David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form written by David Hering and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts – ghostliness, institutionality, reflection – to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace

Author : Ralph Clare
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107195950
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace by : Ralph Clare

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace written by Ralph Clare and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling, comprehensive, and substantive introduction to the work of David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace and Religion

Author : Michael McGowan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501345303
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis David Foster Wallace and Religion by : Michael McGowan

Download or read book David Foster Wallace and Religion written by Michael McGowan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years since his suicide, scholars have explored David Foster Wallace's writing in transdisciplinary ways. This is the first book of its kind to discuss how Wallace understood and wrote about religion. At present, the scholarly community is sharply divided on how best to read Wallace on religious questions. Some interpret him to be a Nietzschean nihilist, while others see in him a profoundly spiritual, even mystical thinker. Some read Wallace as a Buddhist thinker, and others as a Christian existentialist. Involved at every level of this discussion are Wallace's experiences in Twelve Step recovery programs, according to which only a higher power can help one remove unwanted defects of character. The multifarious essays in this volume by literature, religion, and philosophy scholars in the Wallace community delve into Wallace's life and writings to advance the conversation about Wallace and religion. While they may disagree with one another in substantial ways, the contributors argue that Wallace was not only deliberate in his writings on religious themes, but also displayed an impressive level of theological nuance.

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

Author : Stephen J. Burn
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1441186328
Total Pages : 145 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)

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Book Synopsis David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest by : Stephen J. Burn

Download or read book David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest written by Stephen J. Burn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infinite Jest has been hailed as one the great modern American novels and its author, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, as one of the most influential and innovative authors of the past 20 years. Don DeLillo called Infinite Jest a "three-stage rocket to the future," a work "equal to the huge, babbling spin-out sweep of contemporary life," while Time Magazine included Infinite Jest on its list of 100 Greatest Novels published between 1923-2006. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide was the first book to be published on the novel and is a key reference for those who wish to explore further. Infinite Jest has become an exemplar for difficulty in contemporary Fiction-its 1,079 pages full of verbal invention, oblique narration, and a scattered, nonlinear, chronology. In this comprehensively revised second edition, Burn maps Wallace's influence on contemporary American fiction, outlines Wallace's poetics, and provides a full-length study of the novel, drawing out the most important themes and ideas, before surveying Wallace's post-Infinite Jest output, including The Pale King.

David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form

Author : David Hering
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1628920580
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (289 download)

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Book Synopsis David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form by : David Hering

Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace

Author : Stephen J. Burn
Publisher : Modern Language Association
ISBN 13 : 1603293922
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (32 download)

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Book Synopsis Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace by : Stephen J. Burn

Download or read book Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace written by Stephen J. Burn and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Foster Wallace's works engage with his literary moment--roughly summarized as postmodernism--and with the author's historical context. From his famously complex fiction to essays critical of American culture, Wallace's works have at their core essential human concerns such as self-understanding, connecting with others, ethical behavior, and finding meaning. The essays in this volume suggest ways to elucidate Wallace's philosophical and literary preoccupations for today's students, who continue to contend with urgent issues, both personal and political, through reading literature. Part 1, "Materials," offers guidance on biographical, contextual, and archival sources and critical responses to Wallace's writing. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," discuss teaching key works and genres in high school settings, first-year undergraduate writing classes, American literature surveys, seminars on Wallace, and world literature courses. They examine Wallace's social and philosophical contexts and contributions, treating topics such as gender, literary ethics, and the culture of writing programs.

David Foster Wallace and the Body

Author : Peter Sloane
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 100000869X
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis David Foster Wallace and the Body by : Peter Sloane

Download or read book David Foster Wallace and the Body written by Peter Sloane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-17 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Foster Wallace and the Body is the first full-length study to focus on Wallace’s career-long fascination with the human body and the textual representation of the body. The book provides engaging, accessible close readings that highlight the importance of the overlooked, and yet central theme of all of this major American author’s works: having a body. Wallace repeatedly made clear that good fiction is about what it means to be a ‘human being’. A large part of what that means is having a body, and being conscious of the conflicts that arise, morally and physically, as a result; a fact with which, as Wallace forcefully and convincingly argues, we all desire ‘to be reconciled’. Given the ubiquity of the themes of embodiment in Wallace’s work, this study is an important addition to an expanding field. The book also opens up the themes addressed to interrogate aspects of contemporary literature, culture, and society more generally, placing Wallace’s works in the history of literary and philosophical engagements with the brute fact of embodiment.

David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"

Author : Marshall Boswell
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 162892800X
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (289 download)

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Book Synopsis David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" by : Marshall Boswell

Download or read book David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" written by Marshall Boswell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as "the Long Thing." Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as "playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing." Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming "encyclopedic" novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace's three major works, including the generation-defining Infinite Jest. These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace's novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, which will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text.

David Foster Wallace in Context

Author : Clare Hayes-Brady
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 100908108X
Total Pages : 763 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis David Foster Wallace in Context by : Clare Hayes-Brady

Download or read book David Foster Wallace in Context written by Clare Hayes-Brady and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 763 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Foster Wallace is regarded as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book introduces readers to the literary, philosophical and political contexts of Wallace's work. An accessible and useable resource, this volume conceptualizes his work within long-standing critical traditions and with a new awareness of his importance for American literary studies. It shows the range of issues and contexts that inform the work and reading of David Foster Wallace, connecting his writing to diverse ideas, periods and themes. Essays cover topics on gender, sex, violence, race, philosophy, poetry and geography, among many others, guiding new and long-standing readers in understanding the work and influence of this important writer.

David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books

Author : Jeffrey Severs
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231543115
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books by : Jeffrey Severs

Download or read book David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books written by Jeffrey Severs and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we value? Why do we value it? And in a neoliberal age, can morality ever displace money as the primary means of defining value? These are the questions that drove David Foster Wallace, a writer widely credited with changing the face of contemporary fiction and moving it beyond an emotionless postmodern irony. Jeffrey Severs argues in David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books that Wallace was also deeply engaged with the social, political, and economic issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A rebellious economic thinker, Wallace satirized the deforming effects of money, questioned the logic of the monetary system, and saw the world through the lens of value's many hidden and untapped meanings. In original readings of all of Wallace's fiction, from The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest to his story collections and The Pale King, Severs reveals Wallace to be a thoroughly political writer whose works provide an often surreal history of financial crises and economic policies. As Severs demonstrates, the concept of value occupied the intersection of Wallace's major interests: economics, work, metaphysics, mathematics, and morality. Severs ranges from the Great Depression and the New Deal to the realms of finance, insurance, and taxation to detail Wallace's quest for balance and grace in a world of excess and entropy. Wallace showed characters struggling to place two feet on the ground and restlessly sought to "balance the books" of a chaotic culture. Explaining why Wallace's work has galvanized a new phase in contemporary global literature, Severs draws connections to key Wallace forerunners Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, as well as his successors—including Dave Eggers, Teddy Wayne, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadie Smith—interpreting Wallace's legacy in terms of finance, the gift, and office life.

The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

Author : Samuel Cohen
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609381041
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis The Legacy of David Foster Wallace by : Samuel Cohen

Download or read book The Legacy of David Foster Wallace written by Samuel Cohen and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world’s most influential authors. In this elegant volume, literary critics scrutinize the existing Wallace scholarship and at the same time pioneer new ways of understanding Wallace’s fiction and journalism. In critical essays exploring a variety of topics—including Wallace’s relationship to American literary history, his place in literary journalism, his complicated relationship to his postmodernist predecessors, the formal difficulties of his 1996 magnum opus Infinite Jest, his environmental imagination, and the “social life” of his fiction and nonfiction—contributors plumb sources as diverse as Amazon.com reader recommendations, professional book reviews, the 2009 Infinite Summer project, and the David Foster Wallace archive at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. The creative writers—including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and David Lipsky, and Wallace’s Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch—reflect on the person behind the volumes of fiction and nonfiction created during the author’s too-short life. All of the essays, critical and creative alike, are written in an accessible style that does not presume any background in Wallace criticism. Whether the reader is an expert in all things David Foster Wallace, a casual fan of his fiction and nonfiction, or completely new to Wallace, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace will reveal the power and innovation that defined his contribution to literary life and to self-understanding. This illuminating volume is destined to shape our understanding of Wallace, his writing, and his place in history.

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

Author : Clare Hayes-Brady
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501313541
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace by : Clare Hayes-Brady

Download or read book The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace written by Clare Hayes-Brady and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the writing of David Foster Wallace, hailed as the voice of a generation on his death. Critics have identified horror of solipsism, obsession with sincerity and a corresponding ambivalence regarding postmodern irony, and detailed attention to contemporary culture as the central elements of Wallace's writing. Clare Hayes-Brady draws on the evolving discourses of Wallace studies, focusing on the unifying anti-teleology of his writing, arguing that that position is a fundamentally political response to the condition of neo-liberal America. She argues that Wallace's work is most unified by its resistance to closure, which pervades the structural, narrative and stylistic elements of his writing. Taking a broadly thematic approach to the numerous types of 'failure', or lack of completion, visible throughout his work, the book offers a framework within which to read Wallace's work as a coherent whole, rather than split along the lines of fiction versus non-fiction, or pre- and post-Infinite Jest, two critical positions that have become dominant over the last five years. While demonstrating the centrality of 'failure', the book also explores Wallace's approach to sincere communication as a recurring response to what he saw as the inane, self-absorbed commodification of language and society, along with less explored themes such as gender, naming and heroism. Situating Wallace as both a product of his time and an artist sui generis, Hayes-Brady details his abiding interest in philosophy, language and the struggle for an authentic self in late-twentieth-century America.

Wallace’s Dialects

Author : Mary Shapiro
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501348485
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Wallace’s Dialects by : Mary Shapiro

Download or read book Wallace’s Dialects written by Mary Shapiro and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Shapiro explores the use of regional and ethnic dialects in the works of David Foster Wallace, not just as a device used to add realism to dialogue, but as a vehicle for important social commentary about the role language plays in our daily lives, how we express personal identity, and how we navigate social relationships. Wallace's Dialects straddles the fields of linguistic criticism and folk linguistics, considering which linguistic variables of Jewish-American English, African-American English, Midwestern, Southern, and Boston regional dialects were salient enough for Wallace to represent, and how he showed the intersectionality of these with gender and social class. Wallace's own use of language is examined with respect to how it encodes his identity as a white, male, economically privileged Midwesterner, while also foregrounding characteristic and distinctive idiolect features that allowed him to connect to readers across implied social boundaries.

Depression and Dysphoria in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace

Author : Rob Mayo
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000300455
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Depression and Dysphoria in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace by : Rob Mayo

Download or read book Depression and Dysphoria in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace written by Rob Mayo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-01-03 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Depression and Dysphoria in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace is the first full-length study of this critically overlooked theme, addressing a major gap in Wallace studies. Wallace has long been recognised as a ‘depression laureate’ inheriting a mantle previously held by Sylvia Plath due to the frequent and remarkable depictions of depressed characters in his fiction. However, this book resists taking Wallace’s fiction at face value and instead situates close reading of his complex fictions in theoretical dialogue both with philosophical and theoretical texts and with contemporary authors and infl uences. This book explores Wallace’s complex engagement with philosophical and medical ideas of emotional suffering and demonstrates how this evolves over his career. The shifts in Wallace’s thematic focus on various forms of dysphoria, including heartache, loneliness, boredom, and anxiety, as well as depression, correspond to an increasingly pessimistic philosophy underlying his fiction.

Cool Characters

Author : Lee Konstantinou
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674969472
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis Cool Characters by : Lee Konstantinou

Download or read book Cool Characters written by Lee Konstantinou and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lee Konstantinou examines irony in American literary and political life, showing how it migrated from the countercultural margins of the 1950s to the 1980s mainstream. Along the way, irony was absorbed into postmodern theory and ultimately become a target of recent writers who have moved beyond its limitations with a practice of “postirony.”