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The Pale King
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Sunday, 06 November 2011 |
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Most reviews of The Pale King followed the same wary pattern: an acknowledgment of David Foster Wallace's seemingly unstoppable posthumous ascent in the literary firmament, a list of traits commonly held against the author (sentence length, infinite spirals of neurotically involuted thought, a socioeconomic milieu and cast of characters mostly limited to the first-world problems of the white American middle-class), a carefully measured evaluation of the book as worthy yet flawed, a mention of his suicide, a cursory notice of his recently published modal philosophy thesis. No one wants to be the person declaring war on the recently, tragically dead (except for those who do; more in a second), yet these sympathetic-minded reviews seem flawed and unhelpful, leaving two questions unaddressed: what does it mean to be a DFW fan, and (how) does that affect The Pale King's stand-alone literary value?
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Conferences
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Wednesday, 26 October 2011 |
Looks like there is going to be a Wallace panel at the 2012 ACLA annual meeting, March 29-April 1, 2012, at Brown University in Providence and they're looking for more presenters/papers: D.F. Wallace’s controversial impact on a generation of American writers has roots in a sense of cultural crisis which Wallace described, in a Village Voice review of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky’s biography, as our “pass[ing] through our nihilist phase.” Wallace’s Infinite Jest, his Interviews with Hideous Men, and his satiric Consider the Lobster exemplify a self-diagnostic literary style that Wallace has [self] critiqued as some “trick of intertextual quotation or incongruous intertextual quotation…sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization flourish” that keeps “our art from deep convictions or desperate questions.” The questions this seminar might provoke include: Which contemporary writers can be considered Wallace’s heirs? To what degree has Grand Theory, particularly deconstruction, molded their and Wallace’s style and world view? Which models of “deep conviction” such as or besides Dostoevsky’s, could be considered Wallace’s literary influences or provocations? What connections might we make between contemporary literatures of addiction, commodity fetishism, and self-laceration and what Jacques Derrida described, in Of Grammatology, as the erasure or ambiguation of “the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism” ?
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General Updates
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Sunday, 23 October 2011 |
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[Sorry for the lack of updates recently - thanks to those of you who have been mailing me links they'll appear over the next few days. I've been taking a bit of a break from the site, mostly to get things organised in our new home, but also while the 'Gee some of Wallace's non-fiction wasn't 100% accurate let's get all worked up about it' blows over. You know what? It isn't news to long time readers, or those who've actually read his essays closely... I've got a post in the works about it, with some interesting bits and pieces that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.] So anyway... What makes “Shipping Out” such a fantastic specimen of literary journalism is how insistently un-literary it is. It is not delicate; it is not subtle. Wallace, given his remarkable talents, could easily have Shown Not Told and Onion-Peeled and Sublimated his way through the story, suggesting, through the intricacy of his diction and the elasticity of his prose, all the little ironies and oddities that a Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise (line: Celebrity; class: Luxury) might convey. He could have made the cruise a metaphor – for death, for life, for capitalism, for colonialism, for America – and called it a day. (Or seven.) Had “Shipping Out” been written by someone else – had it been written, actually, by anyone else – the result would probably have been a perfectly lovely magazine essay embodying the kind of rhetorical doubling that perfectly lovely magazine essays tend to strive for: on the one hand a travelogue with a transformative narrative arc and appropriately Dickensian details…and on the other a cultural critique of the m.v. Zenith, its curiosities, its context, and the various Global Phenomena it represents: economic entitlement, imperative leisure, people who use “cruise” as a verb.
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