List of Abbreviations Preface: “David Foster Wallace and the Long Thing” Marshall Boswell, Rhodes College, USA Part I: Wallace as Novelist David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas Adam Kelly, University of York, United Kingdom Wallace and Empathy: A Narrative Approach Toon Staes, University of Antwerp, Belgium Boredom, Irony, and Anxiety: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self Allard den Dulk, Amsterdam University College, Netherlands Modelling Community and Narrative in Infinite Jest and The Pale King Andrew Warren, Harvard University, USA Part II: The Novels The Broom of the System (1989) “Then Out of the Rubble”: David Foster Wallace’s Early Fiction Bradley J. Fest, University of Pittsburgh, USA Infinite Jest (1996) Representing Entertainment in Infinite Jest Philip Sayers, University of Toronto, Canada Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest’s Endnotes David Letzler, CUNY Graduate Center, USA The Pale King (2011) “A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness”: The Pale King Stephen Burn, University of Glasgow, Scotland “What Am I, a Machine?”: Humans and Information in The Pale King Conley Wouters, Brandeis University, USA The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in The Pale King Ralph Clare, Boise State University, USA Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in The Pale King Marshall Boswell, Rhodes College, USA Works Cited Notes on Contributors Index
State-of-the-art guide to David Foster Wallace's fiction, focusing exclusively on his novels, The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, and The Pale King.
Marshall Boswell is Professor and Chair of English at Rhodes College, USA. He is the author of John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion and Understanding David Foster Wallace. He is the co-editor, with Stephen Burn, of A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies and served as Guest Editor for a two-part Special Issue of Studies in the Novel devoted to David Foster Wallace's novels. He is also the the author of two works of fiction, Trouble with Girls and the novel Alternative Atlanta.
A new collection of essays, edited by the pioneering Wallace
scholar, Marshall Boswell, is dedicated to the literary form most
conspicuously suited to a writer intent on communicating entire
informational universes within and without … The essays here
reflect the polymathic scope of Wallace’s engagement with the world
and the world of ideas … A principle value of this collection is to
gather early critical accounts of an encyclopedic novel destined to
refine our view of Wallace’s achievement … As another prominent
Wallace scholar, Stephen J. Burn, puts it here, we are still ‘at
the prototype phase of The Pale King criticism … it is only when we
start to disentangle what Wallace originally planned from the
published text … that we can begin the critical project of
understanding The Pale King in earnest.
*Times Literary Supplement (reviewed by Paul Quinn)*
The book succeeds because the essays are not only substantial and
provocative, but also because they are, like Wallace’s novels, in
conversation with each other. It will lead the conversation about
Wallace in exciting new directions.
*PublishersWeekly.com*
Edited by one of the premiere critics of David Foster Wallace's
work, this sparkling collection of essays on Wallace's novels
offers a host of new insights about Wallace's novels, including a
healthy selection of essays on The Pale King, his last, unfinished
novel published posthumously. All readers of Wallace--indeed, all
readers of contemporary fiction--will benefit from these new
perspectives on one of the most important writers to have emerged
in the last thirty years of American literature.
*Patrick O’Donnell, Professor and Chair of English, Michigan State
University, USA*
David Foster Wallace and 'The Long Thing' provides the first
concerted generic consideration of Wallace’s work, by using its
focus on Wallace’s novels and novella to explore his understandings
and uses of the long form. While some essays examine his
repurposing of structural aspects of the novel inherited from
earlier postmodernism, like encyclopedicness and heteroglossia,
others investigate ways in which his long works discover new
communicative potential in the novel as print medium, and as
intimately intertwined with the network of visual and cultural
media in which it lies. Along the way, these essays introduce
fruitful new frameworks for reading Wallace’s work, including
models of consciousness and Jamesian civic responsibility, while
offering some surprising new readings of familiar themes like irony
and communication. Insightful and deft textual analysis, especially
of The Pale King, provides an additional delight. This collection
will be a welcome addition to Wallace studies for all readers,
scholars, and fans of Wallace’s fiction.
*Mary K. Holland, Associate Professor of English, SUNY New Paltz,
USA and author of Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism
in Contemporary American Literature*
If you are obsessed with David Foster Wallace’s novels, or even if
you are only a causal reader (is there such a thing?), you will
want to consult the essays in this volume. At a moment when the
consensus about Wallace is congealing prematurely around a handful
of canonical themes – Infinite Jest is about addiction, Pale King
is about boredom, Wallace’s fiction in general aspires to escape
the gravitational pull of postmodern irony, and so on, you know the
drill – these essays open up other perspectives and fresh
alternatives. Even when they revisit the canonical motifs of
Wallace criticism, they succeed in casting a bracingly estranging
light on tried-and-true themes. Read these essays and don’t settle
for the same old same old!
*Brian McHale, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of
English, The Ohio State University, USA*
David Foster Wallace first and foremost considered himself to be a
novelist. The contributors to David Foster Wallace and “The Long
Thing” rousingly show that we are only at the beginning of our
collective journey through — and understanding of — Wallace’s three
massively, spectacularly important novels. Among its many delights,
this collection moves beyond the critical commonplaces of what it’s
already fair to call David Foster Wallace Studies, and brings
together bracing and original essays on Wallace’s tornadic third
novel The Pale King. An impressive achievement.
*Lee Konstantinou, Assistant Professor English, University of
Maryland, USA*
So much remains to be said about David Foster Wallace's seismic
role in reshaping American fiction. In Marshall Boswell's new
collection, established scholars and new voices provide compelling,
fine-grained accounts of both individual novels and the threads
that connect them.
*Andrew Hoberek, Associate Professor of English, University of
Missouri, USA*
[This] collection is a valuable addition to Wallace scholarship
*Textual Practice*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
