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David Foster Wallace never wrote a play or a film or TV script, as far as we know, but in his fiction he loved working with – to wildly varying degrees of seriousness – the techniques and effects of the playwright and scriptwriter. Most prominent among these is his rendering of rapid-fire, often hilarious dialogue, rife with spiralling speeches in distinctive voices, free of intervening prose descriptions, and sometimes posed on the page in transcript form. Such features led the adaptor John Krasinski, in the film version of Brief Interviews
Several critics have pointed out the relevance of the problem of Descartes's mind–body dualism in David Foster Wallace's oeuvre. What has been ignored is that Wallace's critique of the dualities implied in the Cartesian model involves not only the field of discursivity but also the field of visuality. In this chapter, which will focus on Wallace's magnum opus Infinite Jest ( 1996 ) – a novel famously oversaturated with references to visual culture – I will discuss how the text thematizes a radical questioning of the philosophical dualities
engagements with Wallace and gender see Hayes-Brady, 2016 : 167–91; Holland, 2017 ; Kelly, 2018 . References Baskin , J. ( 2019 ). Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace . Stanford CA : Stanford University Press . Boswell , M. ( 2003 ). Understanding David Foster Wallace . Columbia SC
's writing I will outline the textual representations of affect in both body and language and explain how I see these presentations as inflecting the philosophical engagement with language and communication that consistently animated his writing. In recent years critical attention to Wallace's representation of the body has increased dramatically, with several theses and book-length projects devoted to the topic. Peter Sloane's 2019 book David Foster Wallace and the Body remains probably the widest-ranging consideration of the
Foster Wallace between Philosophy and Literature , held in Pescara, Italy, in 2018, little attention had been dedicated to David Foster Wallace's understanding and literary treatment of gender (or race) until the last few years. An increasing number of studies on these subjects, inaugurated by the seminal works by Clare Hayes-Brady ( 2016 ) and Mary Holland ( 2017 ), have by now managed to signal that these are no marginal aspects of the writer's production and reception. 1 On the contrary, the constitutive character of
The pleasure I take in my thoughts is pleasure in my own strange life. Is this joi de vivre? Wittgenstein, 1998 : 20 According to David Foster Wallace, one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's main concerns during the years between publication of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations was the inability of atomistic language to face the question of the ‘meaning of life
David Foster Wallace's short story ‘Good Old Neon’ is about the philosophical problem of other minds. As we learn in the final pages, the bulk of the story, narrated by the depressed Neal, is in fact the attempt of his former classmate, the character David Wallace, to imagine what could have led to Neal's suicide. 1 The entire story has been the result of ‘David Wallace trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside
Political pollution In a 2003 interview for The Believer David Foster Wallace identifies something of a double bind for the politically minded author: ‘the reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young … fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked’ (Wallace, 2003 ). The problem faced by political writing, Wallace argues, is both a symptom and cause of a broader problem concerning all forms of contemporary American
Gift continued to find ‘an enthusiastic audience among contemporary authors hoping to overcome […] the debilitating legacy of postmodernism’ and fearing that ‘commodification might now be an inescapable condition’. 25 David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Jonathan Lethem, among others, have read and written about Hyde’s work. 26 Lee Konstantinou sees this enthusiasm for Hyde’s ‘ethic of generosity’ as paradigmatic of a ‘post-postmodern mode’ in contemporary fiction that has sought to move beyond ‘the cynical disposition of postmodern self-awareness’. 27 Adam
comically dysfunctional but also disturbing subjects of David Foster Wallace’s collection of short stories Interviews with Hideous Men (2000, first published 1999) or Jennifer Egan’s time-scarred characters in A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) show the continued importance of the grotesque in American literature beyond its strong association with Southern writing; these grotesque novels, whether they be in Irish, American, European or other literatures, exhibit intriguing and suggestive parallels to the fiction I have investigated. However, it is not possible within the