The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace PDF Author: Ralph Clare
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107195950
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace PDF Author: Ralph Clare
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107195950
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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

David Foster Wallace in Context

David Foster Wallace in Context PDF Author: Clare Hayes-Brady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100908108X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 763

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Book Description
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.

David Foster Wallace and the Body

David Foster Wallace and the Body PDF Author: Peter Sloane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100000869X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
David Foster Wallace and the Body is the first full-length study to focus on Wallace’s career-long fascination with the human body and the textual representation of the body. The book provides engaging, accessible close readings that highlight the importance of the overlooked, and yet central theme of all of this major American author’s works: having a body. Wallace repeatedly made clear that good fiction is about what it means to be a ‘human being’. A large part of what that means is having a body, and being conscious of the conflicts that arise, morally and physically, as a result; a fact with which, as Wallace forcefully and convincingly argues, we all desire ‘to be reconciled’. Given the ubiquity of the themes of embodiment in Wallace’s work, this study is an important addition to an expanding field. The book also opens up the themes addressed to interrogate aspects of contemporary literature, culture, and society more generally, placing Wallace’s works in the history of literary and philosophical engagements with the brute fact of embodiment.

A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies

A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies PDF Author: M. Boswell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137078340
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Criticism of the work of David Foster Wallace has tended to be atomistic, focusing on a single aspect of individual works. A Companion to the Work of David Foster Wa ll ace is designed as a professional study of all of Wallace's creative work. This volume includes both thematic essays and focused examinations of each of his major works of fiction.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern American Fiction

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern American Fiction PDF Author: Paula Geyh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107103444
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This Companion is an authoritative, comprehensive, and accessible guide to the key works, genres, and movements of postmodern American fiction.

Depression and Dysphoria in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace

Depression and Dysphoria in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace PDF Author: Rob Mayo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000300455
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
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.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace

Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace PDF Author: Stephen J. Burn
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603293922
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
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.

David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality

David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality PDF Author: Edward Jackson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350117773
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
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.

David Foster Wallace and Religion

David Foster Wallace and Religion PDF Author: Michael McGowan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501345303
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
In the years since his suicide, scholars have explored David Foster Wallace's writing in transdisciplinary ways. This is the first book of its kind to discuss how Wallace understood and wrote about religion. At present, the scholarly community is sharply divided on how best to read Wallace on religious questions. Some interpret him to be a Nietzschean nihilist, while others see in him a profoundly spiritual, even mystical thinker. Some read Wallace as a Buddhist thinker, and others as a Christian existentialist. Involved at every level of this discussion are Wallace's experiences in Twelve Step recovery programs, according to which only a higher power can help one remove unwanted defects of character. The multifarious essays in this volume by literature, religion, and philosophy scholars in the Wallace community delve into Wallace's life and writings to advance the conversation about Wallace and religion. While they may disagree with one another in substantial ways, the contributors argue that Wallace was not only deliberate in his writings on religious themes, but also displayed an impressive level of theological nuance.

Redemptive Hybridism in Post-Postmodern Writing

Redemptive Hybridism in Post-Postmodern Writing PDF Author: Tasha Haines
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501394525
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
From Virginia Woolf to David Foster Wallace and beyond, 'redemptive hybridism' – a new way of reading texts full of possibility and genre blending – emerges as a key trajectory for post-postmodernity. Tasha Haines investigates what she calls 'redemptive hybridism' a tendency in post-postmodern writing characterized by possibility. She suggests that near the 21st century, postmodern élitisme gives way to a reparative blending of high-low forms and genre collaborations for challenging and extending the relationship between writer, written material, and reader. By combining an innovative literary investigation with creative and auto-theoretical strategies, Haines offers valuable new interpretations for texts of 'the modernisms continuum'. Her conversational survey moves among the hybridity of Virginia Woolf, the paratextuality of David Foster Wallace, with Nathalie Sarraute, Édouard Levé, Maggie Nelson and more. In reference to Deleuze and Guattari, Hassan, and others, writers are curated for their approach to form, method, and content, evoking and invoking textual hybridity. Haines articulates a new way of viewing works via comparisons and close-ups that exemplify the possibility and genre-blending that is Redemptive Hybridism in Post-Postmodern Writing.