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Home News by Category Critical Analysis The World of David Foster Wallace

The World of David Foster Wallace

Lee Konstantinou's (@LKONSTAN and co-editor of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace) 28 page essay,The World of David Foster Wallace, from Fall 2013 boundary 2, can be downloaded here if you sign up to Academia.edu. Here are a couple of select quotes from the second section that might help you decide if it's worth your time. (Hint: It is.)

[...]

Interrogating the art of Wallace for its worldly constituents may at first seem perverse. After all, across his three novels, three story collections, two nonfiction volumes, and his other works, Wallace focuses almost exclusively on what have been characterized as US-centric themes. He represents, in his fiction and nonfiction, a sort of postmodern parochialism, identified for him with irony and cynicism, that he found himself complicit in perpetuating and that he wanted to escape, hoping to forge a post-postmodern aesthetic.

[...]

Paul Giles is one of the few critics to claim that Wallace’s fiction shows “how globalization works not just as a distant political theory but as something that affects the hearts and minds of the national community.”30 Giles is not wrong to argue for a transnational dimension to Wallace’s work, but there is also a clear break in Wallace’s fiction from the internationalism of writers such as Pynchon and DeLillo. Wallace suggests that it is increasingly hard, even in an age of globalization, to imagine an outside to American culture for residents of the contemporary United States. In recognizing this dilemma, he is conscious of himself as part of an emerging post-postmodern wave of American artists, indebted to the worldly visions of their predecessors but unable to replicate them. Moreover, Wallace rejects the solution offered by some of his contemporaries, especially the globe-trotting novelist and journalist William T. Vollmann, with whom he felt intensely competitive.

[...]

 

 

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Last Updated on Saturday, 04 January 2014 00:48  

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