David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"
Subtitle: new essays on the novels
By: edited by Marshall Boswell
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9781628920635; 9781628924534
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation
Description: "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, that will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: 1. Introduction: David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" Marshall Boswell Part 1: Early 2. Development Through Dialogue: David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas Adam Kelly 3. "The Out of the Rubble": The Apocalypse in David Foster Wallace's Early Fiction Bradley J. Fest Part 2: Middle 4. Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest's Endnotes David Letzler 5. Beyond Endless "Aesthetic" Irony: Infinite Jest and Kierkegaard's Critique of Irony Allard den Dulk 6. Representing Entertainment(s) in Infinite Jest Philip Sayers Part 3: Late 7. "A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness": Closing Time in The Pale King Stephen J. Burn 8. "Narrative Modeling and Community Organizing in The Pale King and Infinite Jest Andrew Warren 9. Rewriting the Author: A Narrative Approach to Empathy in Infinite Jest and The Pale King Toon Staes10. The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in The Pale King Ralph Clare 11. "What Am I, a Machine?": Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in The Pale King Conley Wouters 12. Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King Marshall Boswell.