The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace PDF Author: Ralph Clare
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107195950
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
A compelling, comprehensive, and substantive introduction to the work of David Foster Wallace.

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace PDF Author: Ralph Clare
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107195950
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
A compelling, comprehensive, and substantive introduction to the work of David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"

David Foster Wallace and Author: Marshall Boswell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628924535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
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.

A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies

A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies PDF Author: M. Boswell
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230338111
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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 Wa ll ace is designed as a professional study of all of Wallace's creative work. This volume includes both thematic essays and focused examinations of each of his major works of fiction.

David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form

David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form PDF Author: David Hering
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628920572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts – ghostliness, institutionality, reflection – to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.

Suicide Century

Suicide Century PDF Author: Andrew Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110841804X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Suicide Century investigates suicide as an increasingly 'normalised' but still deeply traumatic and profoundly baffling act in twentieth-century writing.

The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature PDF Author: Eva-Marie Kröller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107159628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
A fully revised second edition of this multi-author account of Canadian literature, from Aboriginal writing to Margaret Atwood.

A Gravity's Rainbow Companion

A Gravity's Rainbow Companion PDF Author: Steven C. Weisenburger
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of Gravity's Rainbow--how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of Gravity's Rainbow: Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty "Great Books of the Twentieth Century."

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story PDF Author: D. T. Max
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101601116
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The acclaimed New York Times–bestselling biography and “emotionally detailed portrait of the artist as a young man” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) In the first biography of the iconic David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max paints the portrait of a man, self-conscious, obsessive and struggling to find meaning. If Wallace was right when he declared he was “frightfully and thoroughly conventional,” it is only because over the course of his short life and stunning career, he wrestled intimately and relentlessly with the fundamental anxiety of being human. In his characteristic lucid and quick-witted style, Max untangles Wallace’s anxious sense of self, his volatile and sometimes abusive connection with women, and above all, his fraught relationship with fiction as he emerges with his masterpiece Infinite Jest. Written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends and with access to hundreds of unpublished letters, manuscripts and journals, this captivating biography unveils the life of the profoundly complicated man who gave voice to what we thought we could not say.

Understanding David Foster Wallace

Understanding David Foster Wallace PDF Author: Marshall Boswell
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643360701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Since its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction—namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The Pale King. Tracing Wallace's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, this volume provides close readings of all his major works of fiction. Although critics sometimes label Wallace a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. In charting a new direction for literary practice, Wallace does not seek to overturn postmodernism, nor does he call for a return to modernism. Rather his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back. Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism, yet it does so in a way that is comprehensible to a wide and general readership—the very same readership that has enthusiastically embraced Wallace's challenging yet entertaining and redemptive fiction.

The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges

The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges PDF Author: Edwin Williamson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107728827
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was one of the great writers of the twentieth century and the most influential author in the Spanish language of modern times. He had a seminal influence on Latin American literature and a lasting impact on literary fiction in many other languages. However, Borges has been accessible in English only through a number of anthologies drawn mainly from his work of the 1940s and 1950s. The primary aim of this Companion is to provide a more comprehensive account of Borges's oeuvre and the evolution of his writing. It offers critical assessments by leading scholars of the poetry of his youth and the later poetry and fiction, as well as of the 'canonical' volumes of the middle years. Other chapters focus on key themes and interests, and on his influence in literary theory and translation studies.