A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies

by Marshall Boswell (Editor), Stephen J. Burn (Editor)

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.

Genres: Criticism

262 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Marshall Boswell is the T. K. Young Professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where he has taught since 1996. A scholar of contemporary American literature and a fiction writer, he is the author of Trouble with Girls, a short story collection, and the novel Alternative Atlanta. His scholarly work includes Understanding David Foster Wallace and John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy, as well as The Wallace Effect. His fiction has appeared in Playboy, Shenandoah, The Missouri Review, and New Stories from the South. Boswell has received the Clarence Day Awards for both teaching and research at Rhodes. He earned degrees from Washington & Lee, Washington University in St. Louis, and Emory University, and has taught at several institutions including the University of Miami. He also served as editor and contributor to the final volume of the Encyclopedia of American Literature. A musician in his spare time, Boswell once opened for Uncle Tupelo and Alex Chilton.

Reviews

[Paul H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not quite as bad as Legacy, in the sense that these essays at least appear to have been written by actual scholars rather than grad students, but very disappointing overall. The only real points of interest, for me at least, were the cases where authors used the DFW archives, unearthing interesting bits of information (contained in, e.g., letters that DFW wrote to Moore, DeLillo, Franzen, et al.). I dunno: maybe almost all literary criticism is terrible? Maybe new volumes of essays on, say, John Updike are equally bad, but I just never have the opportunity to find out?

Anyway I'd say there are two main problems at work here; triviality and theory.

Take p. 170:

"The Suffering Channel” is hardly Wallace’s only attempt to explore the various ways in which bathrooms aid in self-reflection.

Hardly his only attempt! Indeed! Clearly the topic of "bathrooms and self-reflection in DFW's fiction" is a veritable untapped gold-mine of literary analysis!

And yes, the author then pedantically lists various parts of DFW's fiction were characters talk about bathrooms, or obliquely refer to bathrooms, or are standing in bathrooms . . . I would literally bet all of my assets on the proposition that DFW did not intentionally or subliminally or in any other way infuse "characters standing in bathrooms" with significant meaning. This is the sort of trivial bullshit that a scholar writes when he or she has nothing to say (publish or perish, etc.).

While half the essays are filled with pedantic trivialities, the other half are just jargon/theory, e.g., p. 90:

Describing late capitalist American space, however, involves rather different challenges than did the eras of colonialism, primitive accumulation, or imperialism. The frontiers are more fluid, internal as well as external. “Of capitalist space we can posit a Spinozan pantheism,” writes Fredric Jameson, “in which the informing power is everywhere and nowhere all at once, and yet at the same time in relentless expansion, by way of appropriation and subsumption alike." While this first mode of expansion, appropriation, persists in Wallace (most glaringly in the aggressively redrawn North American map in Infinite Jest), his most distinctive and radical contribution to this evolving spatial imaginary, I would argue, is to shift emphasis toward the latter mode, its much harder to render complement. Subsumption, in the Marxian sense, is first defined and developed in Capital, where it has distinct historical stages of “formal” and “real.” For Jameson, it extends into evermore encompassing postmodern phases, approaching a state “in which the extra-economic or social no longer lies outside capital . . . Where everything has been subsumed under capitalism, there is no longer anything outside it.” A state, that is, where exchange-value has, like Carroll’s and Borges’s maps, subsumed (etymologically, taken under) reality on a scale of 1:1. The resultant capitalist space is like the Expo building in Wallace’s State Fair essay writ large: “Every interior inch . . . is given over to adversion and commerce of a very special and lurid sort.”

Notice that this line of argumentation has nothing to do with the themes in DFW's work. NOTHING. These third-hand 'ideas' could be half-assedly associated with any author whatsoever -- DFW is mentioned at random, sporadically, as an afterthought.

Jameson's conception of capitalist space is purportedly related to DFW writing a magazine article about a state fair having fun things to do ("adversion") and things to buy ("commerce"). Yes, clearly DFW was critiquing late-postmodern capitalism in his straightforward description of a state fair? Or something? I wonder if this author had even read the entire piece? Nothing gives more insight into DFW's work than warmed-over Marxist theory, apparently. (Incidentally what it is with lit-crit types and Jameson? I guess reading Adorno and Auerbach is just too difficult?)

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

The notice from The Howling Fantods:

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/...

ToC

Preface
1. Almost a Novel: The Broom of the System; Patrick O'Donnell
2. A Fiction of Response: Girl with Curious Hair in Context; Kasia Boddy
3. David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity; Roberto Natalini
4. "Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing': Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind; Stephen J. Burn
5. Location's Location: Placing David Foster Wallace; Paul Quinn
6. Mediated Immediacy in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; Mary K. Holland
7. '…': Language, Gender, and Modes of Power in the Work of David Foster Wallace; Claire Hayes-Brady
8. 'The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head': Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness; Marshal Boswell
9. 'The Chains of Not Choosing': Free Will and Faith in William James and David Foster Wallace; David H. Evans
10. The Pale King, or, The White Visitation; Brian McHale
11. The Novel After David Foster Wallace; Andrew Hoberek

[Publius · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pretty disappointing work of criticism on the late David Foster Wallace... many of the essays merely gloss over the surface of the texts and venture off into different directions without a strong central argument. Then again, one shouldn't expect the level of literary criticism of a recently deceased author to be on the level of a say, Vladimir Nabokov. Studies on DFW are still quite barren at the moment.