David Foster Wallace

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David Foster Wallace is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.

Contents

1 Biography
2 Signature Themes and Style
3 Bibliography
4 External links

Biography

Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York February 21, 1962 to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. James had recently finished his Ph.D. at Cornell; 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. He won a professorial appointment within a year and became tenured in 1968. 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. His younger sister, Amy, has practiced law in Arizona since 2005.

As an adolescent, Wallace was athletic, and was regionally ranked as a junior tennis player. He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in philosophy, with a focus on logic and mathematics. He graduated in 1985, summa cum laude, and next pursued an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona, which he earned in 1987. His first novel, The Broom of the System, was published at the same time, and it garnered significant national attention and critical praise. Wallace moved to Boston to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard but 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 a longer novel in 1991 and devoted much of his time to completing it; he submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993. After excerpts from the novel were published through 1995, Wallace finally published it as Infinite Jest in 1996, and sealed his reputation as a brilliant writer with a unique perspective on American culture. He received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 1997, after the publication of this second novel.

Wallace moved to California in 2002, as 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.

Signature Themes and Style

Wallace's fiction is often concerned with what he considers the prevalent contemporary mode of 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," originally published in the small-circulation Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, pointed out the often corrosively ironic effect of television's influence on fiction writing, and urged literary authors to avoid irony's many pitfalls. 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 deeply self conscious cynical and media saturated society.

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 vocabulary words and his self proclaimed love affair with the Oxford English Dictionary. Wallace's unique prose style uses many odd stylistic devices, from self generated abbreviations and acronyms to long dense sentences of many clauses. His most notable rhetorical move is the liberal use of lengthy explanatory footnotes, often nearly as expansive as the text proper; Wallace used footnotes extensively in Infinite Jest, "Octet," and the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996.

His shorter fiction is frequently more aggressively experimental, and has sometimes taken the problem of the authenticity of the authorial voice and the reflexivity of the project of writing to incredible lengths. This can be seen in the story "Octet" in his short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which carries the problem of the author/reader relationship to what might be called either parodic lengths or the limits of sanity, depending on the mood of the reader.

Wallace remains a prominent writer in the U.S. literary fiction world. He has been especially canny in seeking unusual venues for his work, and his often difficult, lengthy writing is frequently published in widely distributed popular publications. Wallace has published his short fiction in Might Magazine, GQ, Playboy, Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, Conjunctions, Esquire magazine, and even the journal Science. His nonfiction has been widely published as well: he has covered Senator John McCain, and 9/11 for Rolling Stone; 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 for The Atlantic; 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. In 2005 he gave the graduation speech at Kenyon College.

Bibliography

Novels

The Broom of the System (1987)
Infinite Jest (1996)

"Short" Story Collections

Girl with Curious Hair (1990) (published in Europe as Westward the Course of the Empire Takes its Way)
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
(2004)

Nonfiction

(1990), coauthored with Mark Costello
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)
Up Simba! (2000)
Everything and More (2003) (First hardcover ed.: ISBN 0393003388)
Consider the Lobster (2005) (First hardcover ed.: ISBN 0316156116)

On Wallace

James Rother, "Reading and Riding the Post-Scientific Wave. The Shorter Fiction of David Foster Wallace." Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993), 216-234. ISBN 1564781232
Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 1570035172
Iannis Goerlandt and Luc Herman, "David Foster Wallace." Post-war Literatures in English: A Lexicon of Contemporary Authors 56 (2004), 1-16; A1-2, B1-2.
Tom LeClair, "The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38.1 (1996), 12-37.
Frank Louis Cioffi, "An Anguish Becomes Thing: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Narrative 8.2 (2000), 161-181.
Catherine Nichols, "Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.1 (2001), 3-16.
Stephen Burn, "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.
Stephen Burn, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. New York, London: Continuum, 2003 (= Continuum Contemporaries) ISBN 082641477X
Michael Harris, "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])
Timothy Jacobs, "David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." The Explicator 58.3 (2000): 172-175.
Timothy Jacobs, "American Touchstone: The Idea of Order in Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Foster Wallace." Comparative Literature Studies 38.3 (2001): 315-231.

Interviews

Larry McCaffery, "An Interview with David Foster Wallace." Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993), 127-150. ISBN 1564781232
Laura Miller, "The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace." Salon 9 (1996). [link]
"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])

External links

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