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Upcoming Publications
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Tuesday, 06 December 2011 |
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Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world’s most influential authors. In this elegant volume, literary critics scrutinize the existing Wallace scholarship and at the same time pioneer new ways of understanding Wallace’s fiction and journalism. In critical essays exploring a variety of topics—including Wallace’s relationship to American literary history, his place in literary journalism, his complicated relationship to his postmodernist predecessors, the formal difficulties of his 1996 magnum opus Infinite Jest, his environmental imagination, and the “social life” of his fiction and nonfiction—contributors plumb sources as diverse as Amazon.com reader recommendations, professional book reviews, the 2009 Infinite Summer project, and the David Foster Wallace archive at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. The creative writers—including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and David Lipsky—and Wallace’s Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch, reflect on the person behind the volumes of fiction and nonfiction created during the author’s too-short life. All of the essays, critical and creative alike, are written in an accessible style that does not presume any background in Wallace criticism. Whether the reader is an expert in all things David Foster Wallace, a casual fan of his fiction and nonfiction, or completely new to Wallace, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace will reveal the power and innovation that defined his contribution to literary life and to self-understanding. This illuminating volume is destined to shape our understanding of Wallace, his writing, and his place in history. Don DeLillo
Dave Eggers
Ed Finn
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Franzen
Paul Giles
Heather Houser
David Lipsky
Rick Moody
Ira B. Nadel
Michael Pietsch
Josh Roiland
George Saunders
Molly Schwartzburg
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Appearances/Readings
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Saturday, 10 December 2011 |
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(Thanks to everyone who got in touch, somehow I missed this one!)
And somewhat related, here's a fantastic (and really insightful) review of Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by Tim Personn, The Dave Show: AOCYEUBY makes a similar focus possible by a peculiar doubling of its author across time and space. The book showcases two different Lipskys: one version of the man in 1996, on the road with Wallace, and an older Lipsky in 2008, sitting at home, listening to the recordings made a decade before. Sometimes this older Lipsky mutters something [intrusions that, in the text, are set in brackets] and, like a commentary track on The Dave Show, you hear his remarks against the backdrop of Wallace’s soft Midwestern speech: less bubbly, less ebullient, but also warm and observant. Lipsky 2008 is, above all, a good reader of character. His mind is anything but dulled by the tragic events of the preceding weeks. To the contrary, it is acute and, like any engaged reader’s, empathetic. He is like you, humbled by the reality of loss, and trying to figure this man out – to intuit the big something that seemed to be missing from all previous writing on David Foster Wallace.
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Infinite Jest
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Wednesday, 04 January 2012 |
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PDF Updated now ver 1.1 1.2 1.3 (But not, it appears, Greg Carlisle's, Elegant Complexity, which also has a number of different chronologies in its appendices, including some that focus on individual characters.) If you notice any errors or corrections you can email drew at the address in the pdf to let her know, and we'll get any corrections up ASAP. Over to Drew: A couple quick acknowledgments. This project was fun but also quite maddening. It would’ve taken three times as long if not for two sources that aided me. The basic layout of IJ’s scenes I used as a template is here: http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/Infinite.htm. And Stephen Burn’s Reader’s Guide to Infinite Jest was helpful, too. However both sources ultimately are incomplete and sometimes erroneous in their dating. That being said, they still both helped tremendously.
Some final advice before you embark. If this is your first time reading Infinite Jest – stop. Read it the way Wallace intended first. Hell, you should probably read it at least twice as it is before opting for this route. Wallace had very good reasons for ordering the book the way he did. The book’s sequencing is just as big a part of its artistic/philosophical statement as any sentence or character. (Also, this guide has spoilers.) If you have read it already and you are looking to experience the book in a new way, I think you’ll find this approach enlightening. Seeing when scenes play out in relation to the other things that are going on sheds a lot of light on the characters as well as some scenes you may have found more cryptic in your other go-arounds. Gaudeamus Igitur!
Drew CordesVassar CollegeClass of 2004
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Upcoming Publications
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Wednesday, 04 January 2012 |
First up, it would appear Amazon has the cover for the paperback release of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King up, I noticed the now hand-written title, but didn't notice the 'With Four Previously Unpublished Scenes' (A wallace-l reader pointed it out. Cheers, Dan). Clarification on this 'unpublished scenes' statement as soon as I have more, but I'm going to assume that because the words scenes and not chapters is used it's not going to be that much material.
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General Updates
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Sunday, 01 January 2012 |
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Happy New Year everyone! I've got some catching up to do around here so I might as well start with something I've been meaning to post for a while. Wallace doesn’t accept the silent social contract between students and professors: He takes apart and analyzes and makes explicit, in a way that is almost painful, all of the tiny conventional unspoken agreements usually made between professors and their students. “Even in a seminar class,” his syllabus states, “it seems a little silly to require participation. Some students who are cripplingly shy, or who can’t always formulate their best thoughts and questions in the rapid back-and-forth of a group discussion, are nevertheless good and serious students. On the other hand, as Prof --- points out supra, our class can’t really function if there isn’t student participation—it will become just me giving a half-assed ad-lib lecture for 90 minutes, which (trust me) will be horrible in all kinds of ways.”
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Infinite Jest
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Thursday, 15 December 2011 |
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It's really quite cool.
[Cheers, Chris]
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DFW Archive
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Friday, 09 December 2011 |
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Elizabeth Lopatto visits The Harry Ransom Centre's David Foster Wallace Archive and studies the drafts for DFW's Kenyon commencement speech in, Come On, Pilgrim: A kind older librarian explains to me for what is the third time that day that she’ll be putting a box on a table, and I can have one folder at a time at my workspace. Due to the rush from South By, one of the folders I want is out. No one else seems to want the Kenyon College commencement address, so I settle in with it. Wallace’s handwriting is small and neat, with distinctive capital “D”s generally written in one stroke that appears to begin at the bottom part of the straight line, go up, curve back around and release. He corrected a typewritten draft in red pen, green pen, and what appeared to be a blue marker. A lot of the speech is tightened in this draft, with whole subclauses reduced to a word or two. Some paragraphs are cut entirely. One of the cut sections was an account of Wallace’s own commencement, some of which is overlaid in red ink with the word “stet”...Continue reading
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The Pale King
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Wednesday, 07 December 2011 |
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I’ll offer two reasons for why you should definitely read The Pale King, directed at two different groups of people: those who don’t have a particular love for Wallace, and those who cherish him. To the first group: this is the most readable, the most mature, and the most focused fiction David Foster Wallace ever wrote. If you’re of the opinion that Broom of the System is some precocious, waffling, meandering text written by a too-smart college senior, or you think Infinite Jest is a slog not worth the slogging through, then The Pale King might just be for you. The individual vignettes are poised and confronting and jarring; they may not come together in the most graceful way, but there are moments in The Pale King that are just plain great, the moments that make Wallace fans go, yep, that’s why. And to the latter, who I guess needs no reason to read The Pale King other than the fact that they love him, that they miss him, and that they will read anything by him: you ought to know that The Pale King features multiple characters who might as well be Wallace; and not David Foster Wallace, but Dave Wallace. You know, the guy we all spent time reading about after David Foster Wallace committed suicide? There’s David Cusk, who suffers from a majorly distressing sweating disorder. There’s Meredith Rand, who despite her seeming normality, ended up in the looneybin. There’s David Wallace himself, who resents Philo, Illinois for its IGA groceries and reminders of his less-than-stellar high school years.
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