The Wallace Effect: David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination

by Marshall Boswell, Stephen J. Burn (Editor)

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.

184 pages, Hardcover

Published January 24, 2019

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.