Understanding David Foster Wallace

by Marshall Boswell

Overview

Since its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction—namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The Pale King.

Tracing Wallace's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, this volume provides close readings of all his major works of fiction. Although critics sometimes label Wallace a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. In charting a new direction for literary practice, Wallace does not seek to overturn postmodernism, nor does he call for a return to modernism. Rather his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back.

Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism, yet it does so in a way that is comprehensible to a wide and general readership—the very same readership that has enthusiastically embraced Wallace's challenging yet entertaining and redemptive fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643360690
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/30/2020
Series:	Understanding Contemporary American Literature
Edition description:	revised and expanded edition
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	1,047,332
Product dimensions:	12.90(w) x 18.90(h) x 7.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Marshall Boswell is the author of John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion and The Wallace Effect: David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination, as well as two works of fiction, Trouble with Girls and Alternative Atlanta. With Stephen Burn he is the coeditor of A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies and the editor of David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing": New Essays on the Novels. Boswell is a professor of English literature at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface vii

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition ix

Chapter 1 Understanding David Foster Wallace 1

Chapter 2 The Broom of the System: Wallace, Wittgenstein, and the Rules of the Game 13

Chapter 3 Girl with Curious Hair: Inside and outside the Set 38

Chapter 4 Infinite Jest: "Too Much Fun for Anyone Mortal to Hope to Endure" 68

Chapter 5 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Interrogations and Consolidations 101

Chapter 6 Oblivion: The Nightmare of Consciousness 116

Chapter 7 The Pale King: Taxes, Civics, and Trickle-Down Citizenship 132

Conclusion 146

Notes 149

Selected Bibliography 157

Index 163

What People are Saying About This

Mary K. Holland

Understanding David Foster Wallace places incisive close readings in a rich context that Wallace's fiction emerged from and shaped—including literary postmodernism, popular culture, philosophies of language, politics, and ethics—to create an overview that is as accessible as it is illuminating. An excellent place to start and return to for scholars, teachers, students, and all readers of Wallace's challenging work.

Stephen Burn

Boswell reads like a novelist and a critic, with a sensitivity to craft and narrative design married to a lucid and eclectic grasp of Wallace's myriad theoretical and intellectual contexts. If you read just one book about Wallace's fiction, this is the study to read.

Clare Hayes-Brady

This welcome edition builds impressively on Boswell's seminal work in its previous incarnations. The volume is rounded out by two chapters on Oblivion and The Pale King, making it a complete and cohesive guide to Wallace's oeuvre. Managing to balance astute observation and accessible style, Understanding David Foster Wallace is indispensable for seasoned scholars and new readers alike.

Ralph Clare

Understanding David Foster Wallace is the first critical study of Wallace that I ever got my hands on and it remains a wonderful introduction to his work. Boswell writes on Wallace with clarity, precision, and a graceful authority. Readers will come away with a firm grasp of Wallace's major themes and aesthetic concerns.

Editorial Reviews

"Understanding David Foster Wallace places incisive close readings in a rich context that Wallace's fiction emerged from and shaped--including literary postmodernism, popular culture, philosophies of language, politics, and ethics--to create an overview that is as accessible as it is illuminating. An excellent place to start and return to for scholars, teachers, students, and all readers of Wallace's challenging work." -- Mary K. Holland, State University of New York, New Paltz

From the Publisher

Boswell makes Wallace much easier to understand, in terms of both his work and his place in the literary canon, in which he is among Pynchon, Barth, Franzen, Eggers, and DeLillo, men who wrote books mostly about men... Recommended.

Choice Reviews