Global Wallace : David Foster Wallace and world literature Graduate students and scholars studying contemporary American fiction David Foster Wallace and world and comparative literature David Foster Wallace is invariably seen as an emphatically American figure. Lucas Thompson challenges this consensus arguing that Wallaces investments in various international literary traditions are central to both his artistic practice and his critique of US culture. Thompson shows how time and again Wallaces fiction draws on a diverse range of global texts appropriating various forms of world literature in the attempt to craft fiction that critiques US culture from oblique and unexpected vantage points. Using a wide range of comparative case studies and drawing on extensive archival research Global Wallace reveals David Foster Wallaces substantial debts to such unexpected figures as Jamaica Kincaid Julio Cortázar Jean Rhys Octavio Paz Leo Tolstoy Zbigniew Herbert and Albert Camus among many others. It also offers a more comprehensive account of the key influences that Wallace scholars have already perceived such as Fyodor Dostoevsky Franz Kafka and Manuel Puig. By reassessing Wallaces body of work in relation to five broadly construed geographic territories Latin America Russia Eastern Europe France and Africa the book reveals the mechanisms with which Wallace played particular literary traditions off one another showing how he appropriated vastly different global texts within his own fiction. By expanding the geographic coordinates of Wallaces work in this way Global Wallace reconceptualizes contemporary American fiction as being embedded within a global exchange of texts and ideas Machine generated contents note: Series Editors Introduction Acknowledgments Introduction. Wallace and the World Chapter One. Wallace and World Literature Chapter Two. Wallace and Latin America Chapter Three. Wallace and Russia Chapter Four. Wallace and Eastern Europe: Kafka and Others Chapter Five. French Existentialisms Afterlives: Wallace and the Fiction of the U.S. South Chapter Six. African American Appropriations: Race Hip Hop and Popular Anthropology Conclusion. Its a Small Continent After All  Wallace and the World Bibliography Index