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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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Conferences
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Saturday, 08 October 2011 |
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Update: Day 3 Parts 2 and Day 4
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Conferences
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Thursday, 29 September 2011 |
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Updated below.
Over to Toon...
Some afterthoughts on “Work in Process: Reading David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Organizer here. I am aware that I might not be the most reliable narrator when it comes to writing a summary of the recent conference on The Pale King, but the Howling Fantods! has been so instrumental in spreading the word on our two-day event—and I think this is something that just about every speaker will acknowledge—that when Nick contacted me for a reaction I felt that the least I owed him was a synopsis. So here goes. The academic year in Belgium doesn’t start until the final week of September—meaning this week, only three days after the conference—so you can imagine the chaos and noise caused by the hundreds of partying students and disoriented newcomers on campus right now. Yet the distinct feeling I had when entering our university building on Monday, through the sliding doors that before the weekend led to the conference venue, was one of surprise at how quiet these hallways could get. Maybe that’s because of the vibrant Wallace-related discussions that carried on during the lunch and coffee breaks on Thursday and Friday, or maybe it’s just the hectic spell that comes with organizing a conference, but I can’t seem to shake the feeling of anxiety and all-around enthusiasm that I now associate with this place. It’s been a great conference, and I really don’t think we could have hoped for two better days than the ones we’ve had: fourteen excellent speakers, including two great keynotes, a warm and friendly atmosphere, and some very lively Q&A’s to boot. [Continued after the break]
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DFW Biography
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Monday, 10 October 2011 |
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Just Kids - Jeffrey Eugenides insists his new novel is not a roman à clef. But it might have been: The writers of his generation had youths tangled enough for ten novels: And when readers open Eugenides’s long-awaited and absorbing new novel, The Marriage Plot, published this week, they’ll find a character who looks very much like Wallace—bandanna, chewing tobacco, expertise in philosophy, struggle with mental illness. Another character looks a lot like Eugenides—a Greek-American from Detroit engaged in religious studies at Brown who takes a big trip abroad and ends up volunteering for Mother Teresa in India. In the book, the two are rivals, and while Eugenides insists the resemblance to Wallace is unintentional, The Marriage Plot is unmistakably a portrait of the author’s youth and of the loyalties and rivalries that so often arise among ambitious young friends. (Much of the early chatter surrounding the novel has been a who’s-who inside-baseball guessing game.) At once a love story, a campus novel, and a bildungsroman, The Marriage Plot is stocked with literary references and choreographed to provide the great page-turning pleasures of realistic fiction—very knowingly. It’s the latest salvo, that is, in the debate that has occupied Eugenides’s generation for 25 years, about what exactly fiction is for and how a crew of literary newcomers might revive the American novel, which seemed to many of them in danger of irrelevance. The Marriage Plot invites us back to that era when the author and his contemporaries were just starting to rewire their aspirations. What makes the backstory so intriguing is who this crowd was and who they came to be.
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General Updates
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Friday, 30 September 2011 |
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Updated 8/10/11 [WSJ] A number of early reviews noted similarities between Leonard and David Foster Wallace. Leonard wears a bandana and chews tobacco, and is a brilliant philosophical polymath who's depressive and stops taking his meds, all traits that match Wallace. Were you purposefully evoking him? [JE] No. I started this in the '90s. It's the bandana that I think makes people think it was him. I was thinking like Axl Rose from Guns N' Roses, and other people I knew in college. It was popular to wear a bandana for people who would be in the co-op and play hacky sack. I think that was it. 8/10/11 So it's not just the bandana, which is not even the only reference to quirky Wallacean headgear in the novel. At one point in The Marriage Plot, Leonard is seen in a photograph that depicts him 'standing in a snowy field, wearing a comically tall stocking cap'. Now, where have I seen a photo like that before ... ? (Continue reading)
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The Pale King
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Saturday, 08 October 2011 |
Adam Plunkett has written an extensive memorial/review of The Pale King for n+1, King of Ghosts, it's a must read piece: “Turgid,” he wrote to me about the first essay I wrote for him. I hadn’t known the word; it sounded like “rigid” and “turd.” Prolix, he elaborated—abstract, clunky, unclear, obfuscatory, “evincing all the worst qualities of academic writing.” My essay had been written for professors, which was like writing for no audience, or worse. I should ideally write my second essay with an eight-word sentence limit and for an audience of 10-year-olds. Unless I were to change my writing drastically, I’d “spend the rest of my life producing only academic essays,” he wrote, before in green pen he changed “essays” to “prose” and added “middling” before “academic,” to be perfectly clear. n+1 have collected a number of pieces of writing about DFW:
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The Pale King
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Wednesday, 21 September 2011 |
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Update: Two(!) more parts added.
A series of articles about The Pale King can be found over at Seven Steps Back.
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