Marshall Boswell

Marshall Boswell examines the four major works of fiction David Foster Wallace has produced thus far: the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Understanding David Foster Wallace

New Essays on the Novels

David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"

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.

Stephen J. Burn

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 Wallace is designed as a professional study of all of Wallace's creative work. With essays written by both top scholars in the field and exciting newcomers, the volume is anchored by a set of essays that provide detailed readings of each of his major works of fiction, including three novels and three story collections. Interwoven through these half-dozen single-text studies are thematic-based essays that address larger segments of Wallace's achievement via an eclectic range of critical environments, including mathematics, the spatial turn in contemporary criticism, gender theory, the legacy of American Pragmatism, and the emergent field of post-postmodern literary studies.

A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies

State-of-the-art guide to David Foster Wallace's fiction, focusing exclusively on his novels, The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, and The Pale King.

A collection of stories follows the teen and young adult years of Parker, who fails spectacularly in his relationships with women and who resists the advances of on-and-off girlfriend Rachel, the only member of the opposite sex who does not reject or attract him. Reprint.

Stories

Trouble with Girls

The Wallace Effect explores David Foster Wallace's contested space at the forefront of 21st-century American fiction. Pioneering Wallace scholar Marshall Boswell does this by illuminating “The Wallace Effect”-the aura of literary competition that Wallace routinely summoned in his fiction and non-fiction and that continues to inform the reception of his work by his contemporaries. A frankly combative writer, Wallace openly challenged his artistic predecessors as he sought to establish himself as the leading literary figure of the post-postmodern turn. Boswell challenges this portrait in two ways. First, he examines novels by Wallace's literary patriarchs and contemporaries that introduce innovations on traditional metafiction that Wallace would later claim as his own. Second, he explores four novels published after Wallace's ascendency that attempt to demythologize Wallace's persona and his literary preeminence. By re-situating Wallace's work in a broader and more contentious literary arena, The Wallace Effect traces both the reach and the limits of Wallace's legacy.

David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination

The Wallace Effect

Structure of the finished "mega-novel" echoes the work's thematic rationale." "To help readers who are interested in a particular Rabbit novel. Boswell devotes a chapter to each individual section of the tetralogy. At the same time, he treats each novel as an integral part of the more comprehensive whole." --Book Jacket.

Marshall Boswell

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