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DFW Archive
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Friday, 29 July 2011 |
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Parts four and five of Samantha Pitchel's series of David Foster Wallace Examinations have been posted at Culture Map Austin. “If you look at his fiction, especially the fiction that he taught, you’ll see in the margin, he’ll write ‘do’ next to a block of text,” Whiteside explains. “[HRC curator Molly Schwartzburg] has an essay coming out about Wallace, about how the Ransom Center got the archive, how it was processed and why it’s organized, how it’s organized. And she writes in this essay, she couldn’t figure out what the ‘do’ meant. And I’m making the argument to her, that’s the teacher in him, he’s saying ‘do this passage.’“ Whiteside made this discovery while browsing through paperbacks in the collection. “The smoking gun here is page 140 of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, where he actually wrote ‘do in class.’” While the endless parade of visitors is a boon for the archive, can the material itself handle the attention? Constant handling can damage the carefully preserved papers, and some boxes are checked out on a near-daily basis. “We are digitizing quite a bit of the collection in order to make a second copy available in the reading room for researchers who are here at the same time as other researchers,” Schwartzburg explains, “but because of copyright, none of that material will be visible outside of our reading room. That’s one of the challenges of contemporary archives, that we can’t make it available on the web the way we might, say, Edgar Allen Poe.”
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The Pale King
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Friday, 29 July 2011 |
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In this way, the theme of information processing is folded into Wallace’s work so that its very mode of delivery (fiction, essays, book reviews - whatever) might coax the reader into not just recognizing but thinking critically about the data swirl around them. This is not, obviously, an effect exclusive to Wallace -- some of his early works, like The Broom of the System and Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (a novella now presented as the concluding story in Girl With Curious Hair) directly grapple with predecessors and influences in fiction and theory -- but it’s his uniquely personalized style, formal inquiry married to ‘self-analysis’ (as you put it), that I think has attracted even casual readers.
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DFW Archive
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Wednesday, 27 July 2011 |
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Part three in the series of David Foster Wallace Examinations is up at Culture Map Austin. [...] But he’s learned that, while the exact titles he’s looking for may not have been included in the stacks received by the HRC, Wallace’s disorganization may actually be an asset. For example, additional notes on “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise,” the Harper’s essay that eventually anchored non-fiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, turned up in the most unexpected place. “While he’s on that cruise he’s reading Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky biography, volume four,” notes Whiteside. “Which isn’t anywhere in the essay, but when you look in the Dostoyevsky bio, on the front page, there’s tons of information about the cruise; the towel boy, just all kind of different things going on. Skeet shooting gets referenced on the inside of that cover.” Digging into the archive, we quickly see that this style of note-taking was common for Wallace.
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DFW Archive
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Tuesday, 26 July 2011 |
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Part two in the series of David Foster Wallace Examinations is up at Culture Map Austin. “What seems to be common with Wallace scholars is people feel an emotional connection to Wallace,” Schwartzburg explains, “as opposed to an intellectual connection. Or, deeply entwined with an intellectual connection. People tend to speak to me or to the staff about the personal relationship they feel with the writer. And that’s something that’s been quite striking about how researchers are approaching their projects; even if the project is very grounded in a specific theoretical question, their experience of working with the manuscripts is very personal.” There are, too, those who believe it’s necessary to approach the collection with a sort of guarded, academic distance, to avoid the illusive promise that closeness to these primary materials equals closeness to the author himself. Because (for example) there’s no way of knowing whether notes about “DW” are self-referential or perhaps notes on the fictionalized David Wallace, who appears as a character in both “Good Old Neon” and The Pale King.
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DFW Archive
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Tuesday, 26 July 2011 |
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As droves of researchers from across the globe line up to pore through materials in the Center’s scholarly archives, one thing is clear: the 2010 purchase of writer David Foster Wallace’s library has earned the HRC an unpredictably massive amount of publicity. As a writer, the MacArthur Award-winning Wallace capitivated readers with his conversational narrative style and his penchant for footnotes (Jest clocks in at a staggering 1,079 pages, which includes 388 annotations). As a person, he continues to attract rock star-caliber attention from fans who feel a close connection to the author, whose works often examine the complexity of depression and the philosophy behind self-satisfaction. This means that the HRC has seen increased interest from both scholarly researchers and literary tourists, Wallace fans desperate to catch glimpses of The Real Dave in his personal papers. “The popularity of the collection has certainly raised our profile,” says the Center’s Cline Curator of Literature, Molly Schwartzburg. “I think more people know about the Ransom Center than would have otherwise, which is wonderful.”
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Critical Analysis
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Tuesday, 26 July 2011 |
Five Dials Number 20 contains contains Jon McGregor's piece, Excessive Innovation and the Anxiety of Influence: A Footnote to the David Foster Wallace Tribute Issue. (The tribute issue is number 10)
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The Pale King
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Tuesday, 26 July 2011 |
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Reviews: Since The Pale King stands unfinished, and given Wallace’s well-known multi-draft work ethic, it seems reasonable to grant that the novel’s prose will necessarily be sometimes more polished, sometimes less so. But in general it is fair to say that, in places, the novel’s prose is also some of the finest that Wallace ever wrote. By which I do not mean the most snazzy and pyrotechnical in the way of his early works. Here we find an artist consciously pushing himself toward a more measured, tempered prose, the voice of one well-poised, not well-posed. It sounds a little facile when stated flatly, but The Pale King feels like the novel that was carrying Wallace into a fuller, deeper artistic maturity. After such a promising early career, and in the knowledge of the author’s exceptional talents, it is saddening to think that we will never see the outcome of that process. Non-Review Updates: Don't forget to check out the massive list of Pale King reviews and related updates over at The Pale King page. |
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Interviews with or concerning DFW
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Friday, 22 July 2011 |
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It's well worth checking out, but I still think (and I've told Ryan this) that he needs to link to the original material where possible and get some dates on those files!
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General Updates
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Friday, 22 July 2011 |
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Over the last few days there have been a few pieces have appeared about a 'Wallace-like character' in Eugenides' upcoming novel, The Marriage Plot: A Novel (due in October). Apparently galleys of the novel are starting to appear. So is the character 'Wallace-like'? Anyone read the galley? Thoughts?
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