Biblioklept - Phantoms and Ghosts in TPKCheck out Edwin Turner's Biblioklept piece about ghosts and phantoms in The Pale King. It's comforting to know that someone put time into considering one of my favourite aspects of the novel. Phantoms and Ghosts in DFW’s Novel The Pale King (Ghost Riff 2) [Here's Ghost Riff 1 if you were wondering...] Add new comment
The DFW Reader Goodreads Giveaway15 copies of The David Foster Wallace Reader are being given away over at Goodreads (if you live in the US). (Looks like there'll be something to win here too next week...)
Preview The David Foster Wallace Reader
You can check out a preview of The David Foster Wallace Reader (due November 11th) over at the Hachette Book Group page. The preview includes the Introduction, The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing, Kevin Dettmar's afterword, excerpts from The Broom of the System, and Gerald Howard's afterword. I received a couple of copies in the post today for my tiny involvement in this collection (I was asked to write the afterword for Incarnations of Burned Children) and now I truly understand that commonly expressed feeling of not wanting to look at something one has written, ever again, now that it is an actual... thing.
Putting all that behind me it's an extensive collection that, yes, contains excerpts of the long things, but also contains Wallace's very best short fiction, non-fiction, and teaching materials. I've not read all of the afterwords, but those I have managed to get to this evening make me want to take my time with the rest. The newly collected passages from Wallace in the selected teaching materials (beautifully introduced by Sally Foster Wallace) highlight his passion for teaching that I know many of his readers wish they were able to experience first hand. There is certainly material in here that will inform my teaching in the future.
[This is where I usually hit you up with a pre-order link to Amazon US because the small commission helps me keep this site running. Unfortunately, the link just takes you to the page where you'll be able to the buy the book when it is released on Nov 11 (thanks to that ongoing dispute). I still haven't decided what to do about it yet...] The David Foster Wallace reader via Amazon UK
Salon: David Foster Wallace’s Amazing Fiction Syllabus
Salon have an excerpt from the upcoming David Foster Wallace Reader right here: David Foster Wallace’s amazing fiction syllabus: “We can talk about whatever you wish to — provided that we do it cogently and well”. Sally Foster Wallace introduces these materials (and more...including teaching and grammar related emails between the two of them!) in the David Foster Wallace Reader released later this month on November 11th.
Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and DFWNew piece by Adam Kelly over at Post45, Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace: [...] 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.[...] 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. 15 Facts About Infinite Jest - mental_flossGot a mention in this list over at mental_floss, 15 Facts About 'Infinite Jest': [...]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."[...]
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