An extended look at one of the pieces found in Both Flesh and Not: Essays that Edwin Turner hadn't read can be found over at biblioklept, A Seven Point Riff on David Foster Wallace’s David Markson Essay:
[...] I suspect that the Markson essay hasn’t been collected up until now because it is so focused on Wittgenstein’s Mistress—this in contrast to, say “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” (Consider the Lobster) which is nominally about Austin’s autobiography but really about much bigger frying fish, like fan-idol relationships and ghostwriting and genre, or “Greatly Exaggerated,” which, again is nominally a review of Dix’s Morte d’Author: An Autopsy but is really more about postmodernism in general. I can’t recall exactly—maybe in his Charlie Rose interview—but Wallace said that he wanted the pieces in his books to be about more than just the ephemeral surface-level topic at hand; like most writers, he was contending for posterity. Wallace’s Markson essay is about Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the state of postmodern or experimental writing in the late 1980s and certain feminist analytic approaches to literature—but mostly it’s a detailed review of Markson’s novel—and it’s not trying to be anything more—which is actually really nice.
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[Wittgenstein’s Mistress is still sitting on my shelf unfinished, yet started a number of times. I'll get to it one day.]
Last Updated on Wednesday, 21 November 2012 22:33
A long review/essay of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace can be found over at The New York Review of Books by Elaine Blair, A New Brilliant Start:
That clichés contain truth might not seem like a startling observation in itself, but it’s a startling thing for a novelist of the first order to make a point of telling us—especially this particular novelist. You don’t have to read Infinite Jest for very long to appreciate Wallace’s sophisticated grasp of all kinds of colloquial, visual, pop cultural, and literary clichés. In one offhand clause he can disassemble some familiar phrase or image, draw attention to it, show us its component parts, implicitly chuckle at its silliness, yet also acknowledge its inescapable importance as a mental reference point for his readers. His dense weave of specific and generic pop references—Reebok athletic clothing in particular and the “centerless eyes,” “ravening maw,” and “canines” of horror movie ghouls in general—is worked in alongside spectacular descriptions of New England weather, the acoustics of a boys’ locker room, and other non-brand-name physical details. Infinite Jest is also a novel that relies, much more than it is given credit for, on fine-grained, psychologically realistic portraiture, at least with regard to its two main characters, Gately and the teenage tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza.
Having established that he is hardly someone who would confuse low art for high, or an original insight for tediously familiar received wisdom, Wallace gives us permission to find solace in common self-help truisms without feeling that we have lost our critical faculties. In other words, he cleaves aesthetic standards from moral ones, and shows us that it is possible, and sometimes necessary, to do so.
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A new article about an English Honors seminar course visit to the HRC DFW Archive is up over at HRC blog, Cultural Compass:
There is something about looking at an author’s handwriting, and leafing through his personal library that grounds you. This was a person, with a life and loved ones: an actual person wrote these books I’m reading, you think, and that realization can be sudden and startling. I am not quite sure why it is easy to forget about the human element of literature, but my time with the Wallace archive helped me remember that I am studying a brilliant person’s imagination incarnate.
If you pop over to the HRC Archive page here you'll find links to all the official Ransom Center articles and many other related pieces about the archive.
There is a review of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by Tim Jacobs in The Toronto Review of Books, Suicide as a Sort of Present: The Cult of DFW. At times highly critical (and carefully argued), but also - largely (Ha! - ed.) - positive too:
[...] But the book is entirely irresistible, and will be received that way for the DFW aficionado and novice alike.
[...]
Ultimately, however, Daniel T. Max has changed the way you think about David Foster Wallace. The book is a revelation: you discover more than you ever wanted to know. And much of what you thought you knew about him through his sculpted public persona—“both affected and genuine in some way,” for the novelist Robert Boswell (57)—was a bit wrong. DFW was a sick man. And he did what all writers do: he wrote what he knew: his sick self. [...]
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Last Updated on Friday, 16 November 2012 00:22
David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's Signifying Rappers will be back in print from July 23rd 2013 with a new foreword by Mark Costello on his experience writing with David Foster Wallace. Pre-order it now.
[via @mattbucher]
Last Updated on Wednesday, 07 November 2012 00:15
Please read Elizabeth Lopatto's piece for The Kenyon Review, Come On, Pilgrim, it's amazing:
[...]
The speech was engaging and earnest. It wasn’t, in Wallace’s words, “a wise old fish” lecturing to us. It was a snapshot of the uncertainties of adulthood, of Wallace trying to drive a final nail in the childhood notion that adults mysteriously somehow always know what to do. He was a compelling speaker, in addition, and every so often would say things like, “skipping some stuff, blah blah blah, you get the point.” I don’t know how to explain it except to say all of the people I talked to after the speech came away with the sense that he was one of us.
[...]
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Well it's been a long time coming, but the theses page has been renamed, updated and reorganised to be much more useful. I've also changed the focus as there's much more to read than works about Infinite Jest. The page now includes links to printed collections of Wallace related critical papers and/or essays, as well as web-based articles that either I, or wider members of the Wallace reader community, think are worth reading. There may well be things you haven't seen in there as they slipped away into the depths of The Howling Fantods...
Check out the 'new' Wallace Criticism Page: Theses, Papers, Essays, Thoughts, Books and Collections.
In addition, I have at least 7 theses/papers ready to add (there are a couple of submissions in the pipeline right now). Some of these were submitted long ago and I've just not devoted the time to getting them up (or in some cases I just completely forgot).
Regardless, they are ready to post now. Rather than post in bulk, I'll post a new one every few days over the next couple of weeks so you've got time to read each one if they catch your interest.
First up, a 2001 Honors Thesis from Alex Chambers:
More in a day or so, don't forget to have a look at The Wallace Criticism Page: Theses, Papers, Essays, Thoughts, Books and Collections.
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