David Foster Wallace

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David Foster Wallace

Born February 21, 1962 (1962-02-21) (age 46)
Ithaca, New York
Occupation Novelist, short story writer, essayist
Nationality Flag of the United States United States
Writing period 1987 - present
Genres Literary fiction
Literary movement
Postmodern literature
Influences

David Foster Wallace (born February 21, 1962) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He is best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. James Wallace had recently finished his Ph.D. at Cornell University; the family soon relocated to central Illinois, where James found work as a philosophy instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1962. Sally attended graduate school in English Composition at the University of Illinois and eventually became a professor of English at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, where she won a national Professor of the Year award in 1996. Wallace's younger sister, Amy, has practiced law in Arizona since 2005.

As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and double-majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize,[1] and he graduated summa cum laude in 1985. He next pursued an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona, which he earned in 1987.

[edit] Career

Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System, garnered significant national attention and critical praise. Wallace moved to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard. He later abandoned them.

In 1992, at the behest of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace applied for and won a position in the English Department at Illinois State University. He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1991, and submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993. After the publication of excerpts throughout 1995, the book was published in 1996.

Wallace received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 1997. In 2002, he moved to Claremont, California, to become the first Roy E. Disney Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College. He teaches one or two undergraduate courses per semester, and focuses on his writing.

[edit] Signature themes and style

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Wallace's fiction is often concerned with irony, which he believes hinders and complicates authentic communication in fiction and culture as a whole. His essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction",[2] originally published in the small-circulation Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, proposed that television has an ironic influence on fiction writing, and urged literary authors to avoid irony. Wallace himself does use many different forms of irony in his work, but he also focuses on individuals' continued longing for earnest, unselfconscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society.[3]

Wallace's novels are sprawling and ambitious; they often meld writing in various modes or voices, and incorporate jargon and vocabulary (sometimes invented) from a wide variety of fields. He is well-known for his use of obscure words and his self-proclaimed love affair with the Oxford English Dictionary. Wallace's prose style uses many unusual stylistic devices, from self-generated abbreviations and acronyms to long sentences of many clauses. His most notable rhetorical move is the use of lengthy explanatory footnotes and endnotes, often nearly as expansive as the text proper; Wallace used endnotes extensively in Infinite Jest, as well as footnotes in "Octet", and the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996. On the Charlie Rose Show in 1997, Wallace claimed that the notes were used to disrupt the linearity of the narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the entire structure. He suggested that he could have alternatively jumbled up the sentences, "but then no one would read it."[4]

In 1997 Wallace was awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by editors of The Paris Review for one of the stories in Brief Interviews — "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6" — which had appeared in the magazine.

Wallace is a prominent figure in contemporary U.S. literary fiction, and his writing has been published in widely distributed popular publications. Wallace has published his short fiction in Might, GQ, Playboy, Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, Conjunctions, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Science. His nonfiction has also been widely published. He covered Senator John McCain ("It feels like we know, for a proven fact," Wallace wrote, "that he's capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self interest."),[5] and 9/11 for Rolling Stone; state fairs and cruise ships for Harper's Magazine; the U.S. Open tennis tournament for Tennis magazine; the director David Lynch and the pornography industry for Premiere magazine; the special-effects film industry for Waterstone's magazine; conservative talk radio host John Ziegler for The Atlantic Monthly; and a lobster festival for Gourmet magazine. He has also reviewed books in several genres for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Of his most recent work of fiction, the story collection Oblivion (2004), Wyatt Mason, writing in the London Review of Books, commented:

The typical mode of narration is digressive; the digressions, in keeping with Wallace's reputation as a humorist of the first rank, are not infrequently very funny. The stories also tend to feature an abundance of neologisms, arcane vocabulary and foreign terms. The settings for the stories include, as well as intimate domesticity, the more public spheres of advertising and publishing, with their own argots, often whipping up blizzards of acronyms. Perhaps more than anything, the defining quality of these fictions is the degree to which they leave the reader unsure about very basic narrative issues: who is telling this story? Where are we? What exactly is happening? In this regard, the title novella of the collection is both representative of what Wallace has been up to, and a test case for the extent to which he has succeeded, according to the demanding terms he has set for himself and for his readers. [6]

In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, which commemorated the magazine's 150th anniversary, an invited series of authors, artists, politicians and others were asked to prepare 300 words or so on "the future of the American idea". Wallace asked whether some things were still worth dying for, and presented a "thought experiment" in which "we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea." He goes on to say that we might have to accept that every now and then "a democratic republic cannot 100% protect itself [from terrorism] without subverting the very principles that made it worth protecting." By comparison, he continues, we accept the 40,000 highway deaths each year as the price we pay for the convenience of the motor car. Finally, he asks, in the context of Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act, and warrantless wiretapping, "Have we become so selfish and scared that we don't even want to consider whether some things trump safety?"

[edit] Bibliography

Novels

Short story collections

Nonfiction

On Wallace

  • Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 1-57003-517-2
  • Burn, Stephen. "Generational Succession and a Source for the Title of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System." Notes on Contemporary Literature 33.2 (2003), 9-11.
  • Burn, Stephen. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. New York, London: Continuum, 2003 (= Continuum Contemporaries) ISBN 0-8264-1477-X
  • Carlisle, Greg. "Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Austin, L.A.: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9761465-3-7
  • Cioffi, Frank Louis. "An Anguish Becomes Thing: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Narrative 8.2 (2000), 161-181.
  • Delfino, Andrew Steven. "Becoming the New Man in Post-Postmodernist Fiction: Portrayals of Masculinities in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club." MA Thesis, Georgia State University. [1]
  • Dowling, William, and Bell, Robert. A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest. Xlibris, 2004. ISBN 1-4134-8446-8 ([2])
  • Goerlandt, Iannis and Luc Herman. "David Foster Wallace." Post-war Literatures in English: A Lexicon of Contemporary Authors 56 (2004), 1-16; A1-2, B1-2.
  • Goerlandt, Iannis. "'Put the book down and slowly walk away': Irony and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47.3 (2006), 309-328.
  • Goerlandt, Iannis. "'Still steaming as its many arms extended': Pain in David Foster Wallace's Incarnations of Burned Children." Sprachkunst 37.2 (2006), 297-308.
  • Harris, Michael. "A Sometimes Funny Book Supposedly about Infinity: A Review of Everything and More." Notices of the AMS 51.6 (2004), 632-638. (full pdf-text)
  • Holland, Mary K. "'The Art's Heart's Purpose': Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47.3 (2006), 218-242.
  • Jacobs, Timothy. "The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49.3 (2007): 265-292.
  • Jacobs, Timothy. "American Touchstone: The Idea of Order in Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Foster Wallace." Comparative Literature Studies 38.3 (2001): 215-231.
  • Jacobs, Timothy. "David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System." Ed. Alan Hedblad. Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Detroit: Gale Research Press, 2001. 41-50.
  • Jacobs, Timothy. "David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." The Explicator 58.3 (2000): 172-175.
  • LeClair, Tom. "The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38.1 (1996), 12-37.
  • Mason, Wyatt. "Don't like it? You don't have to play." London Review of Books 26.22 (2004). http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/maso02_.html
  • Nichols, Catherine. "Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.1 (2001), 3-16.
  • Rother, James. "Reading and Riding the Post-Scientific Wave. The Shorter Fiction of David Foster Wallace." Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993), 216-234. ISBN 1-56478-123-2
  • Tysdal, Dan. "Inarticulation and the Figure of Enjoyment: Raymond Carver's Minimalism Meets David Foster Wallace's 'A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life.'" Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction 38.1 (2003), 66-83.

Interviews

  • Larry McCaffery, "An Interview with David Foster Wallace." Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (Summer 1993), 127-150. ISBN 1-56478-123-2 (text at the Center for Book Culture)
  • Laura Miller, "The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace." Salon 9 (1996). [3]
  • "The Usage Wars." Radio interview with David Foster Wallace and Bryan Garner. The Connection (30 March 2001).
  • Michael Goldfarb, "David Foster Wallace." radio interview for The Connection (25 June 2004). (full audio interview)
  • Charlie Rose, "David Foster Wallace." Interview by Charlie Rose 03/27/1997
  • Zachary Chouteau, "Infinite Zest: Words with the Singular David Foster Wallace." Complete interview done for Bookselling This Week, a publication of the American Bookseller's Association. [4]
  • Dave Eggers, "David Foster Wallace." The Believer. November 2003. [5]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Our Alumni | Amherst College
  2. ^ Wallace, David Foster. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction". Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (2): 151-194. 
  3. ^ A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest
  4. ^ Charlie Rose - Jennifer Harbury & Robert Torricelli / David Foster Wallace
  5. ^ Wyman, Bill (April 4, 2000) "David Foster Wallace: Ain't McCain grand? A postmodern literary lion slobbers all over the former candidate in." Salon.
  6. ^ http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/maso02_.html

[edit] External links

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Persondata
NAME Wallace, David Foster
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Fiction writer, essayist
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Ithaca, New York
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH