New piece by Adam Kelly over at Post45, Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace:
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Sincerity became for Wallace, as it had been for Trilling, one name for a new, or renewed, literary and cultural practice. And while Wallace never mentions Trilling's name in his published work, his awareness of Sincerity and Authenticity is evidenced by a handwritten note he made in a book from his personal library held at the Harry Ransom Center. Moreover, Wallace's pretentions to broad social pronouncement and his liking for cultural and conceptual history—not to mention his liberal imagination, to which I will return—all connect him closely to the figure of Trilling; we might even say that the most famous thing Wallace ever said in an interview—his declaration, made to McCaffery, that "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being"—is a claim made over and over again (minus the swearword) in the humanist literary criticism Trilling wrote.22 But Wallace's overt preoccupation with irony alongside sincerity differentiates him from his forebear and marks his work as a further turn in the dialectic of sincerity. If for Trilling, in other words, the key concept that opposed sincerity was authenticity, for Wallace it was irony. This shift alters the theoretical foundations and cultural connotations of sincerity, and it is also what makes the novel—with its dialogic form and more complex relationship to ironic statement—the place where Wallace's highly developed thinking on sincerity could find its most telling manifestation.
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Great stuff! Continue reading Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace.
Also by Adam Kelly, David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline.
Last Updated on Saturday, 18 October 2014 11:29
Thursday, 16 October 2014 12:23
Got a mention in this list over at mental_floss, 15 Facts About 'Infinite Jest':
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2. Fantastic online Wallace compendium The Howling Fantods has Steven Moore's notes on the first draft of Infinite Jest. Moore knew Wallace when Wallace was teaching at Illinois State, and he was one of three people to see the early manuscript. He describes it as "[a] mess—a patchwork of different fonts and point sizes, with numerous handwritten corrections/additions on most pages, and paginated in a nesting pattern (e.g., p. 22 is followed by 22A-J before resuming with p. 23, which is followed by 23A-D, etc). Much of it is single-spaced, and what footnotes existed at this stage appear at the bottom of pages...Throughout there are notes in the margins, reminders to fix something or other, adjustments to chronology (which seems to have given Wallace quite a bit of trouble), even a few drawings and doodles. Merely flipping through the 4-inch-high manuscript would give even a seasoned editor the howling fantods."[...]
Read it all over at, 15 Facts About 'Infinite Jest'
Last Updated on Thursday, 16 October 2014 12:27
New post over at the DFW15 Conference blog - Endless Cycles.
Last Updated on Thursday, 16 October 2014 10:26
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Paul Debraski reads and reviews Karen Green's Bough Down [Previously] for I Just Read About That...:
[...]This is a powerful and affecting collection of poems/stories. Green is so exposed in her pain. I don’t think I’ve read anything quite like it.
Readers who know who her husband was may be tempted to think they “get” the man more from this, or that this “confirms” things that we think we knew about him. But honestly, whatever we may try to read into these poems, the reality is that these are intensely personal, containing things that only Green knew about him. At first I tried to read them as a kind of biography of “him,” but I soon realized that they are more interesting as a biography of her.
These poems are powerful whether he is known or not.
Read it all here.
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