ellauri072.html on line 499: David Foster Wallace wrote three novels, three story collections, two collections of essays, and other things too, but his reputation still rests mainly on “Infinite Jest” — the 1,100-page novel published in 1996 and set alternately in a tennis academy and a rehab center — and on his sui generis now-nearly-a-genre long-form journalism about topics ranging from lobsters to dictionaries to John McCain to the Adult Video News awards for pornographic films. Wallace’s best work, perhaps by far, is “The Pale King,” an unfinished novel about I.R.S. employees that was assembled posthumously by Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch.
ellauri072.html on line 501: Wallace has given as much to literature as any contemporary American writer. Whether you like him or not, you hear American language, and experience American thinking, differently because of him. Wallace’s ­oeuvre is internally varied but also of a piece.
ellauri072.html on line 508: Infinite Jest is not the only thing that made Wallu famous, though. There was also his bandanna, which was as misinterpreted as so much else about him. As the Max biography explains, Wallace started wearing the bandanna as the least embarrassing solution he could think of to obscure the intense sweating attacks that overcame him without warning. (In high school, he had taken to carrying around a tennis racket and a towel as a tacit cover story for the sweating.) The acutely self-conscious, anxious, addicted and at times showy characters in Wallace’s fiction were not, Max helps us recognize, wildly difficult for Wallace to imagine — the characters were iterations of himself.
ellauri072.html on line 516: Any diagnoses seem as unilluminating as saying that the “reason” someone is short is because he is 5-foot‑1. About Wallace’s problems it seems worth noting simply that his A.A. attendance coincided with a long period of relative wellness, and that getting off the antidepressant Nardil, which he had taken most of his adult life, coincided with a serious crash in mood that ended in his suicide six months later.
ellauri072.html on line 520: The externals of Wallace’s life are not too distinctive. He was a smart kid raised in a middle-class family in Urbana, Ill.; his mother was an English teacher and his father a professor of philosophy. Wallace attended Amherst, where he first had trouble fitting in and then found a niche where he fit in very well. He had some intense and dramatic long-term relationships with women and also his share of brief sexual encounters, and he eventually had what is said to have been a loving and grounded marriage. It is his internal agitations, not his circumstances, that were extreme.
ellauri072.html on line 532: To some extent, his subject matter invites the ad or pro hominem fallacy. Wallace’s lonelies, wastoids and number crunchers are, often, trying to find ways to live well. One understandably slips from reading something concerned with how to be a good person to expecting the writer to have been more naturally kind himself. That thinking is perfectly wrong, though. Alec Baldwin surely has more to teach us than most about how to hold one’s temper; the co-founder of A.A., Bill W., is a guru of sobriety precisely because sobriety was so difficult for him.
ellauri072.html on line 536: Wallace’s fiction is, in its attentiveness and labor and genuine love and play, very nice. But what is achieved on the page, if it is achieved, may not hold stable in real life. As another dangerously romanticizeable suicide, Heinrich von Kleist, once said: “It is not we who know but rather a certain state of mind in us that knows.” And one is not always in the same state of mind.
ellauri072.html on line 540: Another thing, perhaps more powerful, that detains people at the niceness question has to do, I think, with competitiveness. Readers are correct to sense, in Wallace’s elaborate grammars and data fields, not only a generous show but also a tacit petition for our recognition of his intellect. This really annoys some people.
ellauri072.html on line 548: But yes, Wallace was extremely competitive, even to the point of competing about not being competitive. One of the wincing pleasures of Max’s biography is reading excerpts from Wallace’s correspondence, especially with his close friend and combatant Jonathan Franzen, but also with just about every white male writer he might ever have viewed as a rival or mentor. Aggressive self-abasement, grandstanding, veiled abuse, genuine thoughtfulness, thin-skinned pandering — it’s all there. As the correspondents compete about who is making genuine human connections and who and what is really nice and good, they seem to be in some realm far from most kinds of human connection save for that of heated testosteronic battle.
ellauri072.html on line 562: One of the main criticisms of Wallace’s work is that he simply mirrored decay and malaise instead of moving through and beyond them. This was, not infrequently, one of his own main concerns. But the more nattering and pervasive complaint, which takes on more dimension in Max’s biography, is that he is just too brainy and aggressively difficult — just too, well, mean.
ellauri072.html on line 566: Let’s disagree. Wallace’s writing is not as difficult to read as it is famed to be, nor as pandering to entertain as he worried it was. Wallace writes in grammatically correct sentences; he tells jokes; and his work, if you are wired a certain way, will affect you emotionally.
ellauri072.html on line 570: People who find Wallace’s books lacking in heart often object to his thinkiness. But often a thought is an emotion and an emotion is a thought; thinking, like humor, may be an intellectual defense against emotion, but it is a wonderfully advanced defense.
ellauri072.html on line 575: — oh yeah, that’s the other thing, people dismiss (or admire) Wallace’s work as “cool”.
ellauri077.html on line 46: This article examines David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest alongside its eponymous film, arguing that they share a common purpose, but that the former succeeds where the latter fails. Coupled with a biographical and phenomenological analysis, the aim of this examination is to better understand Infinite Jest’s place in the cultural and literary movement away from post-modernism. Through the novel, Wallace seeks a cure for the postmodern malaise that is irony, which creates a distancing effect between author and reader. I argue that he collapses this distance by creating a conversation-like novel that uses sentimentality and endnotes to converse with a generation bombarded with easily consumable irony from television, advertisements, and even art. The results of this conversation are the curtailing of passive consumption of entertainment and the beginning of a new sincerity in literature, which allows for grand narratives without the unending cynicism of postmodernism.
ellauri077.html on line 56: ¹Christopher Bartlett^* (2016) “An Exercise in Telemachry”: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Intergenerational Conversation. in Critique: Studies in ContemporaryFiction, 57:4, 374-389, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2015.1113921
ellauri077.html on line 207: But not all things emanating from this country move quite so quickly. Take, for instance, David Foster Wallace’s near-canonical mega-novel Infinite Jest: released in the States in 1996, it has in 20 years been translated into just five languages. (A sixth translation into Greek is currently in the works.) At this rate, it is moving only slightly faster than the massive Quixote, which had appeared in England, France, the Germanic territories, and Venice 20 years after its complete Castilian publication in 1615. However, Jest is massively behind the 3,600-page über-novel My Struggle, which—just 5 years after its complete Norwegian release—is available or forthcoming in over 20 languages.
ellauri077.html on line 209: To determine precisely what forces have determined the globalization of David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, I spoke to writers, translators, and publishers in eight countries familiar with the work and its multiple manifestations. This is what they told me (2016).
ellauri077.html on line 218: Galindo tells me that Wallace’s heavy sense of irony and self-deprecation fits in rather well with contemporary Brazil: “What... is much more HUMAN. It is not AMERICAN (though, I repeat, he may have thought it was).
ellauri077.html on line 220: The French attributed the book’s great success to the French love of the “écrivain maudit” archetype, Wallace’s acerbic critique of America, and the myth that has grown up around the author: “A writer who seems to have been sacrificing his life on the altar of literature is seen as a hero.”
ellauri077.html on line 454: He is the author of the monograph Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer: A Philosophical Analysis of Contemporary American Literature (Bloomsbury 2015) – for more information about this book, see below. His work has appeared in different academic journals and collections (see Publications). Currently, he is working on a book tentatively titled Wallace’s Existentialist Intertexts: Comparative Readings with the Fiction of Kafka, Dostoevsky, Camus and Sartre.
ellauri082.html on line 314: Wallace’s tight prose and his very precise use of the drug-users thought process, such as planning to smoke in large quantities to induce a horrible high in order to create an intense aversion to smoking or mulling over the decision to call a dealer for an update for their ETA, creates an incruciating relatable charatcer in Erdedy. Anyone who has struggled with slowing down or completely stopping a vice that has consumed their daily life may find this passage incredibly relatable.
xxx/ellauri178.html on line 138: While she wrote that the 1,096-page epic cemented Foster-Wallace as “one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything”, she also quoted Henry James in calling Jest a “loose, baggy monster”, adding that it read like a “vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr Wallace’s mind”. In his 2012 biography of the late Foster-Wallace, DT Max wrote that the writer “told a friend he hid in his room for two days and cried after reading yet another paragraph of Rei devoted to parallels between his first book and Pynchon’s most popular novel”.
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