UNDERSTANDING
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Marshall Boswell
In Understanding David Foster Wallace, Marshall Boswell examines the
four major works of fiction Wallace has published 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. In his readings of
these works, Boswell affirms that Wallace, though still young, compels
our attention not only for the singular excellence of his work but, perhaps
more important, for his groundbreaking effort to chart a fruitful and affirmative new direction for the literary novel at a time of bleak prospects.
In addition to providing self-contained readings of each text, Boswell
places Wallace within a trajectory of literary innovation that begins with
James Joyce and continues through Wallace’s most important postmodern
forebears, John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Although Wallace is sometimes labeled a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be
regarded as the nervous leader of some still unnamed—and perhaps
unnameable—third wave of modernism. Boswell contends that in charting
an innovative course for literary practice, Wallace does not seek merely to
overturn postmodernism, nor simply to return to modernism. Instead he
moves resolutely forward as his writing hoists the baggage of modernism
and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back.
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MARSHALL BOSWELL holds a
Ph.D. from Emory University. He is
the T. K. Young Professor of English
Literature at Rhodes College in
Memphis, where he teaches twentieth-century American literature and
fiction writing. The author of John
Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered
Irony in Motion and a collection of
short stories, Tro u ble with Girl s ,
Boswell is currently at work on a
novel. He lives in Memphis.
UNDERSTANDING DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
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