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Critical Analysis
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Saturday, 22 January 2011 |
Last year I received an email from Michael Badger wondering if I'd like to have a look at his essay about Infinite Jest. I said sure, but didn't get around to reading it for a while. When I finally got around to it I was stunned by the piece's enthusiasm and had great fun reading it. I hope you do too. It's also interesting because the end result is not what Michael originally intended, and to clarify this, I asked him to put together a small introduction for readers. Just a warning, if you've not yet read Infinite Jest there are plenty of spoilers. Over to Michael: A Preliminary Explanation/Summarization of A Preliminary Explanation/Summarization
The piece of work you are about to embark upon was written in the summer of 2010 for an individual study contract at The Evergreen State College. My aim with the following piece is to introduce people to Infinite Jest in a way that removes them from the Oh-my-God-that-novel-is-huge mentality but also invokes the possible reader of IJ to take action and to enjoy that action.
I began it (the piece) with the idea of writing a simple 10-page essay describing the themes and ideas at play within the Eschaton debacle on pages 380-442 of Infinite Jest. This initial idea was a failure. More importantly, however, the resultant piece was, I believe, a great success. And this is why: the piece below (d)evolves from the original idea into a (at times) chaotic, yet deliberate, exploration into many of the ideas present within IJ and I think that this (d)evolution happened because of the inherent traits of IJ as its own entity. What I mean is that because of the things at work within Wallace’s novel (read as world) there is an organic need to explain and to understand all that Wallace is trying to do and say. And still even more simply: every aspect of IJ is intrinsically connected to every other aspect; and so for any singular part to make any proper sense there is a necessity for explanation of the whole.
Other than that, I think that the piece came out like it did, style-wise, because of two things: a) It is very hard not to mimic Wallace’s writing style whilst reading anything by him, and b) because I was having a great deal of fun while writing it. And mainly I want to impart that—the literal, exhilerating fun—onto any reader of this piece and Infinite Jest.
Michael Badger III Download the pdf, An Exhaustive Essay of pages 380-442 of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest |
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Critical Analysis
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Wednesday, 12 January 2011 |
The Common Review has published a great article by Rebekah Frumkin about David Foster Wallace titled Our Psychic Living Room. It's a great read. The first section, Why It's Particularly Important to Read David Foster Wallace, begins: Two years have now passed since the death of David Foster Wallace in the fall of 2008. His legacy as a writer has been the subject of nonstop debate since the day of his suicide. I’ll cut to the chase: I believe he was, in his own way, a literary genius. Let me explain why. You may have opened Harper’s or Rolling Stone back around the turn of the century and read a really funny essay by a chatty, neurotic writer who had Rain Man–like abilities to recall and describe experiences as diverse as attending the Illinois State Fair, playing tennis during a tornado, and following John McCain’s presidential campaign. You may have found the essays hilarious, or quite brilliant. You may have gone so far as to say, as the critic Michiko Kakutani did in the New York Times, that they described modern life with “humor and fervor and verve,” and you may have wanted to read more of them. Regardless of how you felt, you probably dealt with the situation in a normal, adult way. That is, you looked up the essayist’s name online and maybe bought some of his collections, like Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I’ll go ahead and assume you didn’t form an obsessive attachment to the author and delve perilously deep into his essays and fiction and then have to purge all your David Foster Wallace emotional attachment errata onto a blank page and call it an “essay.” Because that’s what I did—and let me tell you, gentle reader: it hasn’t been fun. But it has given me something to do with my time, and it’s also given me this sort of quixotic sense of purpose, this mission to Tell the People about David Foster Wallace—because the people, being a well-educated and discerning people, deserve to know. But this is an embarrassing mission, to be sure, because what if the people already know about David Foster Wallace? The majority of readers of this magazine will probably test out of David Foster Wallace 101, having already read some of his essays and maybe some of his fiction or, failing that, the numerous adoring profiles. But what do these readers actually think about David Foster Wallace? Isn’t all the postmortem hype confusing and disorienting? Isn’t he the kind of dense novelist who gets touted by stoner twenty- and thirty-somethings? Is liking Wallace just a grad school affectation, like watching Danish art films? Is liking Wallace a fun and cool thing to do because he had a history of substance abuse and underwent electroconvulsive therapy? Or does liking Wallace have nothing to do with grad school or stories of Genius in Its Byronic Youth and everything to do with patience and an earnest desire to be a better human being? I think so. I think it’ll become quite obvious if you grit your teeth and hack away at all the melodramatic bullshit. Continue reading Rebekah Frumkin's Our Psychic Living Room. [via @ankurthakkar]
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Critical Analysis
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Thursday, 06 January 2011 |
Great article by Jennifer Howard over at The Chronicle of Higher Education titled The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace. It's a look at the development of critical work about David Foster Wallace: Readers outside academe caught on to Wallace before scholars did. When he died, academic interest in him had only begun to show real signs of life, with scholars starting to look closely at the ways in which Wallace responded to and reshaped for a new generation the postmodernism practiced by writers like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Two years later, spurred in part by his death but even more by a rising generation of young scholars, the impending publication of a posthumous novel, and the opening of a major archive of the writer's papers, David Foster Wallace studies is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise. The article is filled with some of the exciting projects being worked on by scholars such as: - Marshall Boswell (Understanding David Foster Wallace) and Stephen Burn (David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide ) are presently coediting a collection of scholarly articles about David Foster Wallace.
- Stephen Burn has edited a collection of interviews with Wallace, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi, and he is editing a volume of Wallace's letters in collaboration with the writer's estate.
- The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, is scheduled for publication by the University of Iowa Press and is likely to appear in 2012. It will combine a broad range of critical essays with thoughts on Wallace by other creative writers, including his friend Don DeLillo and his sometime rival Jonathan Franzen. Samuel Cohen, an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Lee Konstantinou, a postdoctoral fellow in Stanford University's Program in Writing and Rhetoric, are the volume's co-editors.
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Critical Analysis
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Wednesday, 05 January 2011 |
Happy new year! I'm back from my hols and have a backlog of stuff (some that I posted to my twitter feed) to place here over the next few days - some longer pieces too.
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Philosophy
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Wednesday, 15 December 2010 |
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There's a piece by Moira G. Weigel over at the Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog about David Foster Wallace's Philosophy thesis that is worth checking out - welcome to anyone who's made it to this site after reading it. David Foster Wallace: His Secret Life As a Philosopher, refutes a few points of speculation that keep cropping up about the publication. Namely, it was submitted for peer review, it is seen as an important philosophical work, and David Foster Wallace had tried to publish it: Edited by Steven Cahn and Maureen Eckert, both professional philosophers, “Fate, Time, and Language” surrounds Wallace’s thesis with the academic articles to which he was responding. The book also includes an introduction by New York Times Magazine editor, James Ryerson and an epilogue by Jay Garfield, one of Wallace’s advisors, who now teaches at Smith College. The novelist Mark Costello, who was Wallace’s college roommate and close friend, confirms that Wallace, who had briefly enrolled as a philosophy graduate student, tried to publish his thesis with Harvard University Press in the 1990s. “Dave felt the manuscript solved a problem which was still being talked about in academic circles as ‘unsolved.’ He said to me that he sent it to Harvard with the idea that ‘in case anyone actually wants to know the answer, here it is.’” Eckert, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and had long admired Wallace’s work, met Costello at a memorial service for Wallace held at Amherst in the fall of 2008. Costello told her how important the thesis had been to his friend. Eckert contacted Cahn, a legendary professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, who supervised her dissertation and whose research Taylor himself had supervised at Columbia in the 1960s. “I called and asked: Steve, did you know that this famous writer wrote a whole thesis on you and Taylor? And Steve was like, really? He had never heard about David Foster Wallace! I managed to get a PDF to him.” Cahn contacted Wendy Lochner, who acquires titles in philosophy for Columbia University Press. Lochner submitted Wallace’s thesis to the usual strenuous process of academic peer review. “I was asking people not so much would this be interesting because it was Wallace’s but is it interesting in its own right as a work of philosophy. The reviews confirm that it was.” “There is no doubt about it,” Cahn echoes. “This is a serious piece of philosophy. It stands on its own.”
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Philosophy
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Sunday, 12 December 2010 |
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Update: Biblioklept review added. Reviews: Depending on where you source your books from, some lucky readers have already received their copies in the mail.
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