DFW@MLA III
I haven't had a chance to write up the MLA panel I helped organize, "The Legacy of David Foster Wallace." It was very well attended -- especially for an 8:30 a.m. panel on the last day of the convention -- and the talks were all terrific. Fortunately for me, Kathleen Fitzpatrick has written up the special session, offering much more detail than my swiss cheese memory would have been able to provide.
Here are some key tidbits (from Michael Pietsch's talk) about Wallace's forthcoming unfinished novel, The Pale King:
Pietsch says Wallace had been working on since 1996, and the novel went through various working titles, including “Glitterer,” “SJF” (which stood for Sir John Feelgood), and “What is Peoria For?” As we’ve heard, Wallace did extensive research for the novel in accounting, tax processes, and so forth. What I hadn’t heard before today was that various pieces we’ve seen in stand-alone form are in fact chapters of the novel, including “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” and “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Pietsch is working with more than 1000 pages of manuscript, in 150 unique chapters; the novel will be published in time for tax day in April 2011. As we know, the subject of the novel is boredom. The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it’s all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity. The finished book is expected to be more than 400 pages, and will be explicitly subtitled “An Unfinished Novel”; the plan is to make available the drafts and phases the text went through on a website that will exist alongside the book. Pietsch is editing the book in close collaboration with Bonnie Nadell and the estate, but as we’ve heard him say before, he sees his role very clearly as attempting to order the text into a unified whole, and not making changes that the author isn’t there to argue with.
There is something deeply appropriate about Wallace's decision to confront the question of boredom, given how much Infinite Jest is concerned with rapturous entertainment. It's almost as if Wallace saw in the boring, the banal, and the cliché the best candidates for what used to be called grace or spiritual enlightenment.
DFW @ MLA II
I'm still working on trying to figure out how to restore my older blog postings. I think my XML export file might've been corrupted during export. In the worst case scenario, I'll manually restore my old posts, though that'll screw up the dates and mean all comments on these posts will be forever lost.
On an unrelated note, I want to put in a plug for the special session I helped organize at the upcoming MLA Convention in Philadelphia. If you're around, please stop by "The Legacy of David Foster Wallace," which is at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, December 30th, in Independence Salon I at the Philadelphia Marriott.
We have a distinguished group of panelists including Stephen J. Burn (North Michigan U.), Marshall Boswell (Rhodes C.), Sam Cohen (U. of Missouri, Columbia), John Conley (UMN, Twin Cities), Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona), Mary Holland (SUNY New Paltz), and -- very fortunately -- Wallace's Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch.
I'll be talking about how Wallace's interpretation of the role of the avant-garde shaped his literary projects.
Infinite Summer
For those who haven't already heard, allow me to direct your attention to the launching post of Infinite Summer, an organized effort to read through Infinite Jest this summer, endnotes and all.
The irony for me is that I'm too bogged down finishing a dissertation chapter about Wallace (and Dave Eggers) to participate. Maybe after I get my dissertation in the can I can try to play catch-up.
Postirony, again. And DFW.
One negative consequence of publishing Pop Apocalypse is that I've been blogging very little about my dissertation. For four years, I pretty regularly updated my other blog, The Postironic Times, but in 2008 I closed up shop there, transferred all my postings to this site, but lost a bit of momentum in the switch.
Well, of course, I never stopped writing my dissertation (it sometimes seem as if I'll never stop!) or conducting research on postirony or going to conferences or doing any of that tasty academic stuff.
Today, I received some good news: an MLA special session I proposed on the legacy of David Foster Wallace's writing has been accepted. The roundtable panel will feature a distinguished group of academic folk who have done great work on Wallace. We are also very fortunate to have Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor at Little, Brown, participating in our discussion.
Here go a few key paragraphs from our proposal, which'll give you a sense of what we have planned:
The September 2008 suicide of David Foster Wallace sent shock waves through the literary world. Equally admired for his fiction and nonfiction, Wallace was considered one of the best writers of his generation, “a huge talent, our strongest rhetorical writer,” according to Jonathan Franzen. As early as 1993, academic critics recognized the importance of Wallace’s prolific body of experimental writing, which as of now comprises two critically acclaimed novels--including the thousand-page “Infinite Jest”--three short story collections, two collections of eclectic essays, a book-length mathematical history of infinity, a co-authored book on rap culture, a short book on John McCain’s failed 2000 primary campaign, and others. Wallace’s writing style seemed utterly original but hard to categorize, weaving together a number of characteristic features: hypotactic, sometimes pages-long sentences that fuse highly technical vocabularies with colloquial diction; extensive digressions, footnotes, and endnotes, also sometimes many pages in length; a mixture of silly, elaborate jokes with a deep sense of moral seriousness; and a love of philosophical paradoxes and puzzles.
And:
To focus our inquiry into the nature and scope of Wallace’s achievement, our discussion will largely concentrate on what is indisputably Wallace’s magnum opus, “Infinite Jest.” “Infinite Jest” is a novel that draws on a staggeringly diverse range of discourses--neuroscience, advertising, game theory, philosophy of mind, self-help and recovery theory, marginal economics, television history, among others--in order to ask fundamental questions about what it means to be human in an era of mass hypermediation and widespread cynicism. We will take this novel as the most accomplished articulation of Wallace’s aesthetic and philosophical aims, his attempt, as he put it in a commencement speech delivered at Kenyon College, “to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of [his] natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.” Though we will all make reference to “Infinite Jest,” we will not limit ourselves only to discussing this encyclopedic work; our talks will use “Infinite Jest” as a platform or hub from which to stage a searching analysis of the broader set of issues that animate Wallace’s fiction, criticism, and journalism.
I'll post more as the convention approaches in December. We hope to see you there.
DeLillotastic News
As if I didn't have enough to do, between job applications, teaching, various forms of blogging, and occasionally dissertation-writing (let's not even discuss new-novel writing), I decided to shoot off an abstract applying to participate in the American Comparative Literature Association's 2009 annual meeting. Specifically to a fascinating-sounding seminar called "Master of the Universe: Literature, Culture, and Finance Culture."
I submitted an abstract for a paper called "The Cosmopolitanism of High Finance in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis." And who woulda thunk: the abstract was accepted into the seminar. So now I must add one more thing to do on my to-do list, right after Check To-Do List Regularly. This commitment will force me to do some much-needed thinking and writing on DeLillo, who is hovering all over my dissertation but whom I don't directly address. Wallace and Franzen were hugely influenced by DeLillo -- reading their letters to him at the Ransom Center is utterly fascinating -- and I think the general critical classification of DeLillo as a postmodernist gets him wrong in important ways.
Naturally enough, I try to position DeLillo as an author who shares many of the concerns and aesthetic commitments of the folks I call postironists, though his concerns clearly predate whole postironic careers. There is a risk when you write a dissertation -- or anything -- of discovering your interests everywhere you look, but I think I can defend my claim that the dominant reflexive readings of DeLillo's career tend to rely too much on White Noise as their model of DeLillodom (or maybe DeLillohood). No, I say. Not so!
The more I read by DeLillo, the more I am convinced that White Noise is actually quite anomalous in his career. He's not so ironic, once you get to know his writing. Rather, I see him as someone who wishes he could avoid irony -- which is for him defined by the detachment of words from their referents -- but who holds out little hope that it's possible to do so anymore.
The Broom of the System
I finished reading David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System today (for the first time), part of my preparation to write the Person Chapter of the diss. The writing of the Hipster Chapter also continues, less apace than I'd prefer, but still. I'm reading a fantastic history of the hugely-important literary journal Kenyon Review (by Marian Janssen) and have just started Arnold Rampersad's newly-released biography of Ralph Ellison--which also looks very promising. Work on my own novel has begun to compete for brain bandwidth with all of the aforementioned stuff, but I'm in a period of relative calm vis-a-vis Pop Apocalypse. Just turned in a revised draft to my editor.
All of which is to say, when combined with fellowship applications and other projects, that this is one of the busiest times in my writing/thinking life, like ever, but I can't complain; it's a very wonderful gift to have this time and these opportunities. Many equally if not more worthy people don't have chances like these.
But back to DFW:
Reading Broom was a trip--it'll definitely find its way into the Infinite Jest-centered Person Chapter of the diss. What has begun to obsess me in my critical writing is how very much the educational contexts of a writer's background shape his or her production. What makes Broom so much of a trip then is the extensiveness and sophistication with which its author comments on the format and content of fiction produced in the MFA and creative-writing classroom circa the mid-to-late '80s. And also takes on the still-strong theoretical orthodoxies of that paradoxically Reaganesque-cum-poststructuralist moment.
That is, it seems as if DFW was keenly aware of what the dominant and competing strands of literary orthodoxy were at the time that he was writing. How his analysis of and reaction to these orthodoxies launched his career-trajectory and how his fictional and essayistic responses have set an agenda for his contemporaries is the subject of my person chapter--and the Believer Chapter that follows from it.
When discussing Broom, I think I will want to focus these questions through an analysis of how DFW fictionally reimagines the concept of a "person." Can a talking parrot be a person? How are fictional characters like people--and/or not? Does a notion of communication serve as the logical foundation for personhood or does the logical priority go the other way around (person then communication)?
Based on Wallace's reading of Wittgenstein, I suspect that he takes communication as the minimal lynch-pin of what it means to be a person. From this, various consequences follow, including of course the notion that irony is destructive to our humanity and personhood.
These are my preliminary thoughts as I try to wrap my mind around Broom, which anticipates Infinite Jest in lots of important ways, though it's a less-good novel by comparison. Then again, DFW wrote the book when he was in his early twenties, so he can maybe be forgiven for its flaws, I think.
The Broom of the System
I finished reading David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System today (for the first time), part of my preparation to write the Person Chapter of the diss. The writing of the Hipster Chapter also continues, less apace than I'd prefer, but still. I'm reading a fantastic history of the hugely-important literary journal Kenyon Review (by Marian Janssen) and have just started Arnold Rampersad's newly-released biography of Ralph Ellison--which also looks very promising. Work on my own novel has begun to compete for brain bandwidth with all of the aforementioned stuff, but I'm in a period of relative calm vis-a-vis Pop Apocalypse. Just turned in a revised draft to my editor.
All of which is to say, when combined with fellowship applications and other projects, that this is one of the busiest times in my writing/thinking life, like ever, but I can't complain; it's a very wonderful gift to have this time and these opportunities. Many equally if not more worthy people don't have chances like these.
But back to DFW:
Reading Broom was a trip--it'll definitely find its way into the Infinite Jest-centered Person Chapter of the diss. What has begun to obsess me in my critical writing is how very much the educational contexts of a writer's background shape his or her production. What makes Broom so much of a trip then is the extensiveness and sophistication with which its author comments on the format and content of fiction produced in the MFA and creative-writing classroom circa the mid-to-late '80s. And also takes on the still-strong theoretical orthodoxies of that paradoxically Reaganesque-cum-poststructuralist moment.
That is, it seems as if DFW was keenly aware of what the dominant and competing strands of literary orthodoxy were at the time that he was writing. How his analysis of and reaction to these orthodoxies launched his career-trajectory and how his fictional and essayistic responses have set an agenda for his contemporaries is the subject of my person chapter--and the Believer Chapter that follows from it.
When discussing Broom, I think I will want to focus these questions through an analysis of how DFW fictionally reimagines the concept of a "person." Can a talking parrot be a person? How are fictional characters like people--and/or not? Does a notion of communication serve as the logical foundation for personhood or does the logical priority go the other way around (person then communication)?
Based on Wallace's reading of Wittgenstein, I suspect that he takes communication as the minimal lynch-pin of what it means to be a person. From this, various consequences follow, including of course the notion that irony is destructive to our humanity and personhood.
These are my preliminary thoughts as I try to wrap my mind around Broom, which anticipates Infinite Jest in lots of important ways, though it's a less-good novel by comparison. Then again, DFW wrote the book when he was in his early twenties, so he can maybe be forgiven for its flaws, I think.