Head over to the Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog for a series of blog posts by three big names in Wallace scholarship to honor the 56th anniversary of David Foster Wallace's birth and to celebrate the mark he has made on contemporary culture and literature.
David Hering - Thinking About David Foster Wallace, Misogyny and Scholarship
[...] What I mean to illustrate by these examples is not that Wallace was some shining, gender-conscious saint – he wasn’t – but that when we talk about misogyny in relation to his writing we might be attuned to the fact that he was committed to addressing it as a major problem of contemporary culture. Does he always succeed? No. Should we talk about the problems inherent in Wallace’s portrayals of gender? Of course. It’s fundamental to a reading and understanding of the work. But this shouldn’t preclude a discussion that moves beyond an elision of Wallace’s work with the more unsavoury elements of his readership. [...]Clare Hayes-Brady - Belatedness: reading David Foster Wallace in 2018
[...] Fascinated by language and large systems, Wallace imagined dystopian futures in which American society was corporatised and tranquilised by consumerism to the point of a near-total loss of energy. While Jest, in particular, looks at the entertainment industry, and the danger of a society gratifying its most infantile desires, the undercurrent of Wallace’s writing is distinctly political, a thread that has begun to be given serious critical attention in recent years. Throughout his work, political and civic engagement appears to offer a kind of purpose that is the very antithesis of the narcissistic disaffection he depicts in so many of his characters. [...]Marshall Boswell - The Wallace Effect
[...] What fascinated me most about Eugenides’ playful strategy was the resourceful way it drew upon, and even parodied, Wallace’s various fictional confrontations with his literary rivals, namely John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. [...]Great reading.
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