David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" (eBook, ePUB)

New Essays on the Novels
Redaktion: Boswell, Marshall

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 31. Juli 2014
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781628928006
• Artikelnr.: 48420809

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

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