David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
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ISBN : 1441186328
Pages : 144 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (411 users)


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Infinite Jest has been hailed as one the great modern American novels and its author, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, as one of the most influential and innovative authors of the past 20 years. Don DeLillo called Infinite Jest a "three-stage rocket to the future," a work "equal to the huge, babbling spin-out sweep of contemporary life," while Time Magazine included Infinite Jest on its list of 100 Greatest Novels published between 1923-2006. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide was the first book to be published on the novel and is a key reference for those who wish to explore further. Infinite Jest has become an exemplar for difficulty in contemporary Fiction-its 1,079 pages full of verbal invention, oblique narration, and a scattered, nonlinear, chronology. In this comprehensively revised second edition, Burn maps Wallace's influence on contemporary American fiction, outlines Wallace's poetics, and provides a full-length study of the novel, drawing out the most important themes and ideas, before surveying Wallace's post-Infinite Jest output, including The Pale King.

A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest

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ISBN : 9781413484465
Pages : 0 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (844 users)


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A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest is a guide for readers who have heard about the literary genius of David Foster Wallace's huge and sprawling novel but have been put off by its length and narrative complexity. Composed by two distinguished literary scholars, the Companion is designed both for general readers and for college students taking courses on postmodern fiction. Along with an detailed overview of narrative structure, the Companion includes a synopsis of plot, a compendium of major characters, a directory of minor characters and real people, a short dictionary of slang and idioms, and a section listing and explaining Infinite Jest's acronyms.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (Book Analysis)

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Publisher : BrightSummaries.com
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ISBN : 2808018932
Pages : 21 pages
Rating : 4.8/5 (8 users)


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Unlock the more straightforward side of Infinite Jest with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, a vast, sweeping novel which takes in a tennis academy for gifted young players, a halfway house for recovering addicts and an “entertainment” rumoured to be so compelling that it will kill whoever watches it. The novel’s scope, humour and complexity mean that it is widely recognised as the author’s masterpiece and as one of the greatest novels of recent years. David Foster Wallace was an American writer, and is one of the most influential authors of recent years. Besides Infinite Jest, he is also known for the short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. Find out everything you need to know about Infinite Jest in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

Conversations with David Foster Wallace

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Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
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ISBN : 1617032271
Pages : 210 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (17 users)


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Conversations with the author of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Infinite Jest

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
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ISBN : 1107195950
Pages : 287 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (71 users)


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A compelling, comprehensive, and substantive introduction to the work of David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
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ISBN : 1628920580
Pages : 192 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (289 users)


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In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts – ghostliness, institutionality, reflection – to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.

David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
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ISBN : 0231543115
Pages : 304 pages
Rating : 4.2/5 (315 users)


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What do we value? Why do we value it? And in a neoliberal age, can morality ever displace money as the primary means of defining value? These are the questions that drove David Foster Wallace, a writer widely credited with changing the face of contemporary fiction and moving it beyond an emotionless postmodern irony. Jeffrey Severs argues in David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books that Wallace was also deeply engaged with the social, political, and economic issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A rebellious economic thinker, Wallace satirized the deforming effects of money, questioned the logic of the monetary system, and saw the world through the lens of value's many hidden and untapped meanings. In original readings of all of Wallace's fiction, from The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest to his story collections and The Pale King, Severs reveals Wallace to be a thoroughly political writer whose works provide an often surreal history of financial crises and economic policies. As Severs demonstrates, the concept of value occupied the intersection of Wallace's major interests: economics, work, metaphysics, mathematics, and morality. Severs ranges from the Great Depression and the New Deal to the realms of finance, insurance, and taxation to detail Wallace's quest for balance and grace in a world of excess and entropy. Wallace showed characters struggling to place two feet on the ground and restlessly sought to "balance the books" of a chaotic culture. Explaining why Wallace's work has galvanized a new phase in contemporary global literature, Severs draws connections to key Wallace forerunners Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, as well as his successors—including Dave Eggers, Teddy Wayne, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadie Smith—interpreting Wallace's legacy in terms of finance, the gift, and office life.

David Foster Wallace in Context

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
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ISBN : 100908108X
Pages : 763 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (9 users)


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David Foster Wallace is regarded as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book introduces readers to the literary, philosophical and political contexts of Wallace's work. An accessible and useable resource, this volume conceptualizes his work within long-standing critical traditions and with a new awareness of his importance for American literary studies. It shows the range of issues and contexts that inform the work and reading of David Foster Wallace, connecting his writing to diverse ideas, periods and themes. Essays cover topics on gender, sex, violence, race, philosophy, poetry and geography, among many others, guiding new and long-standing readers in understanding the work and influence of this important writer.

The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

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Publisher : University of Iowa Press
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ISBN : 1609381041
Pages : 244 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (93 users)


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Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world’s most influential authors. In this elegant volume, literary critics scrutinize the existing Wallace scholarship and at the same time pioneer new ways of understanding Wallace’s fiction and journalism. In critical essays exploring a variety of topics—including Wallace’s relationship to American literary history, his place in literary journalism, his complicated relationship to his postmodernist predecessors, the formal difficulties of his 1996 magnum opus Infinite Jest, his environmental imagination, and the “social life” of his fiction and nonfiction—contributors plumb sources as diverse as Amazon.com reader recommendations, professional book reviews, the 2009 Infinite Summer project, and the David Foster Wallace archive at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. The creative writers—including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and David Lipsky, and Wallace’s Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch—reflect on the person behind the volumes of fiction and nonfiction created during the author’s too-short life. All of the essays, critical and creative alike, are written in an accessible style that does not presume any background in Wallace criticism. Whether the reader is an expert in all things David Foster Wallace, a casual fan of his fiction and nonfiction, or completely new to Wallace, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace will reveal the power and innovation that defined his contribution to literary life and to self-understanding. This illuminating volume is destined to shape our understanding of Wallace, his writing, and his place in history.

Global Wallace

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
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ISBN : 150132067X
Pages : 240 pages
Rating : 4.5/5 (13 users)


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David Foster Wallace is invariably seen as an emphatically American figure. Lucas Thompson challenges this consensus, arguing that Wallace's investments in various international literary traditions are central to both his artistic practice and his critique of US culture. Thompson shows how, time and again, Wallace's fiction draws on a diverse range of global texts, appropriating various forms of world literature in the attempt to craft fiction that critiques US culture from oblique and unexpected vantage points. Using a wide range of comparative case studies, and drawing on extensive archival research, Global Wallace reveals David Foster Wallace's substantial debts to such unexpected figures as Jamaica Kincaid, Julio Cortázar, Jean Rhys, Octavio Paz, Leo Tolstoy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Albert Camus, among many others. It also offers a more comprehensive account of the key influences that Wallace scholars have already perceived, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Manuel Puig. By reassessing Wallace's body of work in relation to five broadly construed geographic territories -- Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Africa -- the book reveals the mechanisms with which Wallace played particular literary traditions off one another, showing how he appropriated vastly different global texts within his own fiction. By expanding the geographic coordinates of Wallace's work in this way, Global Wallace reconceptualizes contemporary American fiction, as being embedded within a global exchange of texts and ideas.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace

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Publisher : Modern Language Association
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ISBN : 1603293922
Pages : 226 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (32 users)


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David Foster Wallace’s works engage with his literary moment--roughly summarized as postmodernism--and with the author’s historical context. From his famously complex fiction to essays critical of American culture, Wallace’s works have at their core essential human concerns such as self-understanding, connecting with others, ethical behavior, and finding meaning. The essays in this volume suggest ways to elucidate Wallace’s philosophical and literary preoccupations for today’s students, who continue to contend with urgent issues, both personal and political, through reading literature. Part 1, “Materials,†offers guidance on biographical, contextual, and archival sources and critical responses to Wallace’s writing. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,†discuss teaching key works and genres in high school settings, first-year undergraduate writing classes, American literature surveys, seminars on Wallace, and world literature courses. They examine Wallace’s social and philosophical contexts and contributions, treating topics such as gender, literary ethics, and the culture of writing programs.

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
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ISBN : 1501313541
Pages : 208 pages
Rating : 4.5/5 (13 users)


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This book examines the writing of David Foster Wallace, hailed as the voice of a generation on his death. Critics have identified horror of solipsism, obsession with sincerity and a corresponding ambivalence regarding postmodern irony, and detailed attention to contemporary culture as the central elements of Wallace's writing. Clare Hayes-Brady draws on the evolving discourses of Wallace studies, focusing on the unifying anti-teleology of his writing, arguing that that position is a fundamentally political response to the condition of neo-liberal America. She argues that Wallace's work is most unified by its resistance to closure, which pervades the structural, narrative and stylistic elements of his writing. Taking a broadly thematic approach to the numerous types of 'failure', or lack of completion, visible throughout his work, the book offers a framework within which to read Wallace's work as a coherent whole, rather than split along the lines of fiction versus non-fiction, or pre- and post-Infinite Jest, two critical positions that have become dominant over the last five years. While demonstrating the centrality of 'failure', the book also explores Wallace's approach to sincere communication as a recurring response to what he saw as the inane, self-absorbed commodification of language and society, along with less explored themes such as gender, naming and heroism. Situating Wallace as both a product of his time and an artist sui generis, Hayes-Brady details his abiding interest in philosophy, language and the struggle for an authentic self in late-twentieth-century America.

Depression and Dysphoria in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace

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Publisher : Routledge
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ISBN : 1000300455
Pages : 180 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (3 users)


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Depression and Dysphoria in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace is the first full-length study of this critically overlooked theme, addressing a major gap in Wallace studies. Wallace has long been recognised as a ‘depression laureate’ inheriting a mantle previously held by Sylvia Plath due to the frequent and remarkable depictions of depressed characters in his fiction. However, this book resists taking Wallace’s fiction at face value and instead situates close reading of his complex fictions in theoretical dialogue both with philosophical and theoretical texts and with contemporary authors and infl uences. This book explores Wallace’s complex engagement with philosophical and medical ideas of emotional suffering and demonstrates how this evolves over his career. The shifts in Wallace’s thematic focus on various forms of dysphoria, including heartache, loneliness, boredom, and anxiety, as well as depression, correspond to an increasingly pessimistic philosophy underlying his fiction.

Cloneliness

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
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ISBN : 1501344846
Pages : 253 pages
Rating : 4.5/5 (13 users)


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Recent posthuman philosophies, human-computer interface studies, and technology-inspired biopolitical discourses and practices are reinventing and reimagining loneliness in different communities. Cloneliness: The Reproduction of Loneliness takes a cross-cultural approach to loneliness by examining 20th-century artistic expressions and examinations of loneliness in the context of more recent global expressions grounded in social networks, virtual reality, the biopolitical commons, academic credentialization and such practices as Hikikomori. Newer forms of loneliness, pushed by the algorithms of biopolitical capitalism, result in what this books calls "cloneliness." Michael O'Sullivan plots the transformation in loneliness in literature and philosophy in readings that take us from Henry James and such classic works as Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice and Richard Yates's Eleven Kinds of Loneliness to more recent expressions in such writers as David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, and Sayaka Murata. Michael O'Sullivan argues that cloneliness as an institutional practice of reproduction in society nurtures, normalizes, and reproduces loneliness in order to create subjects who are more willing to accept ideologies of competition, “extreme individualism,” and the stresses of being "interconnected loners."

David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
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ISBN : 1350117781
Pages : 224 pages
Rating : 4.3/5 (51 users)


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David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality: Hideousness, Neoliberalism, Spermatics is the first full-length study of perhaps the most controversial aspect of Wallace's work – male sexuality. Departing from biographical accounts of Wallace's troubled relationship to sex, the book offers new and engaging close readings of this vexed topic in both his fiction and non-fiction. Wallace consistently returns to images of sexual toxicity across his career to argue that, when it comes to sex, men are immutably hideous. He makes this argument by drawing on a variety of neoliberal logics and spermatic metaphors, which in their appeal to apparently neutral economic processes and natural bodily facts, forestall the possibility that men can change. The book therefore provides a revisionist account of Wallace's attitudes towards capitalism, as well as a critical dissection of his approach to masculinity and sexuality. In doing so, David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality shows how Wallace can be considered a neoliberal writer, whose commitment to furthering male sexual toxicity is a disturbing but undeniable part of his literary project.

The Graphic Canon, Vol. 3

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Publisher : Seven Stories Press
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ISBN : 1609807065
Pages : 576 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (98 users)


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NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Publisher's Weekly "Best Summer Books of 2013" The Daily Beast's "Brainy Summer Beach Reads" The classic literary canon meets the comics artists, illustrators, and other artists who have remade reading in Russ Kick's magisterial, three-volume, full-color The Graphic Canon, volumes 1, 2, and 3. Volume 3 brings to life the literature of the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, including a Sherlock Holmes mystery, an H.G. Wells story, an illustrated guide to the Beat writers, a one-act play from Zora Neale Hurston, a disturbing meditation on Naked Lunch, Rilke's soul-stirring Letters to a Young Poet, Anaïs Nin's diaries, the visions of Black Elk, the heroin classic The Man With the Golden Arm (published four years before William Burroughs' Junky), and the postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Kathy Acker, Raymond Carver, and Donald Barthelme. The towering works of modernism are here--T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," Yeats's "The Second Coming" done as a magazine spread, Heart of Darkness, stories from Kafka, The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, and his short story "Araby" from Dubliners, rare early work from Faulkner and Hemingway (by artists who have drawn for Marvel), and poems by Gertrude Stein and Edna St. Vincent Millay. You'll also find original comic versions of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, Flannery O'Connor, and Saki (manga style), plus adaptations of Lolita (and everyone said it couldn't be done!), The Age of Innocence, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Last Exit to Brooklyn, J.G. Ballard's Crash, and photo-dioramas for Animal Farm and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Feast your eyes on new full-page illustrations for 1984, Brave New World, Waiting for Godot, One Hundred Years of Solitude,The Bell Jar, On the Road, Lord of the Flies, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and three Borges stories. Robert Crumb's rarely seen adaptation of Nausea captures Sartre's existential dread. Dame Darcy illustrates Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece, Blood Meridian, universally considered one of the most brutal novels ever written and long regarded as unfilmable by Hollywood. Tara Seibel, the only female artist involved with the Harvey Pekar Project, turns in an exquisite series of illustrations for The Great Gatsby. And then there's the moment we've been waiting for: the first graphic adaptation from Kurt Vonnegut's masterwork, Slaughterhouse-Five. Among many other gems.

David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
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ISBN : 162892800X
Pages : 256 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (289 users)


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Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as "the Long Thing." Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as "playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing." Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming "encyclopedic" novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace's three major works, including the generation-defining Infinite Jest. These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace's novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, which will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text.