Stephen J. Burn

CONVERSACIONES CON DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential, critically-significant and popular contemporary American novelists. This book is the first full-length study of his work and attempts to articulate where American fiction is headed after postmodernism. Stephen Burn provides a comprehensive analysis of each of Franzen's novels - from his early work to the major success of The Corrections - identifying key sources, delineating important narrative strategies, and revealing how Franzen's themes are reinforced by each novel's structure. Supplementing this analysis with comparisons to key contemporaries, David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, Burn suggests how Franzen's work is indicative of the direction of experimental American fiction in the wake of the so-called end of postmodernism.

Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism

A fully revised and expanded edition of Burn's influential guide to a central postmodern novel.

A Reader's Guide

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Second Edition

Patrick O'Donnell

Lesley Larkin

Neue Perspektiven und aufschlussreiche Erörterungen der zeitgenössischen amerikanischen Belletristik Mit der Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 präsentiert ein Team renommierter Geisteswissenschaftler eine umfassende zielgerichtete Sammlung von Beiträgen zu einigen der bedeutendsten und einflussreichsten Autoren und literarischen Themen der letzten vier Jahrzehnte. In aktuellen Beiträgen bekannter und neuer Autoren werden so unterschiedliche Themen wie Multikulturalismus, zeitgenössische Regionalismen, Realismus nach dem Poststrukturalismus, indigene Erzählungen, Globalismus und Big Data im Kontext der amerikanischen Belletristik der letzten 40 Jahre betrachtet. Die Enzyklopädie bietet einen Überblick über die amerikanische Belletristik zur Jahrtausendwende sowie einen Ausblick auf die Zukunft. In diesem Werk findet sich eine ausgewogene Mischung aus Analyse, Zusammenfassung und Kritik für eine erhellende Betrachtung der enthaltenen Themen. Außerdem enthält das Werk: * Eine spannende Mischung von Beiträgen bekannter und aufstrebender Autoren aus aller Welt, in denen zentrale aktuelle Themen der amerikanischen Belletristik diskutiert werden * Eine gezielte kritische Betrachtung von Autoren und Themen, die für die amerikanische Belletristik von wesentlicher Bedeutung sind * Themen, in denen sich die Energie und die Tendenzen in der zeitgenössischen amerikanischen Belletristik in den vierzig Jahren zwischen 1980 und 2020 widerspiegeln Die Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 ist ein unverzichtbares Nachschlagewerk für Studierende und Doktoranden in den Bereichen amerikanische Literatur, Englisch, kreatives Schreiben und Belletristik. Darüber hinaus darf das Werk in den Bibliotheken von Geisteswissenschaftlern nicht fehlen, die nach einer maßgeblichen Sammlung von Beiträgen bekannter und neuerer Autoren der zeitgenössischen Belletristik suchen.

1980 - 2020

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes

Across two decades of intense creativity, David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) crafted a remarkable body of work that ranged from unclassifiable essays to a book about transfinite mathematics to vertiginous fictions. Whether through essay volumes (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster), short story collections (Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion), or his novels (Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System), the luminous qualities of Wallace's work recalibrated our measures of modern literary achievement. Conversations with David Foster Wallace gathers twenty-two interviews and profiles that trace the arc of Wallace's career, shedding light on his omnivorous talent. Jonathan Franzen has argued that, for Wallace, an interview provided a formal enclosure in which the writer “could safely draw on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise.” Wallace's interviews create a wormhole in which an author's private theorizing about art spill into the public record. Wallace's best interviews are vital extra-literary documents, in which we catch him thinking aloud about his signature concerns—irony's magnetic hold on contemporary language, the pale last days of postmodernism, the delicate exchange that exists between reader and writer. At the same time, his acute focus moves across MFA programs, his negotiations with religious belief, the role of footnotes in his writing, and his multifaceted conception of his work's architecture. Conversations with David Foster Wallace includes a previously unpublished interview from 2005, and a version of Larry McCaffery's influential Review of Contemporary Fiction interview with Wallace that has been expanded with new material drawn from the original raw transcript.

Conversations with David Foster Wallace

Marshall Boswell

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.

A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies

Written in the shadow of the approaching millennium, American literature in the 1990s was beset by bleak announcements of the end of books, the end of postmodernism, and even the end of literature. Yet, as conservative critics marked the century's twilight hours by launching elegies for the conventional canon, American writers proved the continuing vitality of their literature by reinvigorating inherited forms, by adopting and adapting emerging technologies to narrative ends, and by finding new voices that had remained outside that canon for too long. By reading 1990s literature in a sequence of shifting contexts - from independent presses to the AIDS crisis, and from angelology to virtual reality - American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 provides the fullest map yet of the changing shape of a rich and diverse decade's literary production. It offers new perspectives on the period's well-known landmarks, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, but also overdue recognition to writers such as Ana Castillo, Evan Dara, Steve Erickson, and Carole Maso.

American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000

Across two decades of intense creativity, David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) crafted a remarkable body of work that ranged from unclassifiable essays, to a book about transfinite mathematics, to vertiginous fictions. Whether through essay volumes (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster), short story collections (Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion), or his novels (Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System), the luminous qualities of Wallace’s work recalibrated our measures of modern literary achievement. Conversations with David Foster Wallace gathers twenty-two interviews and profiles that trace the arc of Wallace’s career, shedding light on his omnivorous talent. Jonathan Franzen has argued that, for Wallace, an interview provided a formal enclosure in which the writer "could safely draw on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise." Wallace’s interviews create a wormhole in which an author’s private theorizing about art spill into the public record. Wallace’s best interviews are vital extra-literary documents, in which we catch him thinking aloud about his signature concerns—irony’s magnetic hold on contemporary language, the pale last days of postmodernism, the delicate exchange that exists between reader and writer. At the same time, his acute focus moves across MFA programs, his negotiations with religious belief, the role of footnotes in his writing, and his multifaceted conception of his work’s architecture. Conversations with David Foster Wallace includes a previously unpublished interview from 2005, and a version of Larry McCaffery’s influential Review of Contemporary Fiction interview with Wallace that has been expanded with new material drawn from the original raw transcript.

Mary K. Holland

David Foster Wallace’s works engage with his literary moment--roughly summarized as postmodernism--and with the author’s historical context. From his famously complex fiction to essays critical of American culture, Wallace’s works have at their core essential human concerns such as self-understanding, connecting with others, ethical behavior, and finding meaning. The essays in this volume suggest ways to elucidate Wallace’s philosophical and literary preoccupations for today’s students, who continue to contend with urgent issues, both personal and political, through reading literature. Part 1, “Materials,â€ offers guidance on biographical, contextual, and archival sources and critical responses to Wallace’s writing. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,â€ discuss teaching key works and genres in high school settings, first-year undergraduate writing classes, American literature surveys, seminars on Wallace, and world literature courses. They examine Wallace’s social and philosophical contexts and contributions, treating topics such as gender, literary ethics, and the culture of writing programs.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest has been hailed as one the great modern American novels and its author, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, as one of the most influential and innovative authors of the past 20 years. Don DeLillo called Infinite Jest a "three-stage rocket to the future," a work "equal to the huge, babbling spin-out sweep of contemporary life," while Time Magazine included Infinite Jest on its list of 100 Greatest Novels published between 1923-2006. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide was the first book to be published on the novel and is a key reference for those who wish to explore further. Infinite Jest has become an exemplar for difficulty in contemporary Fiction-its 1,079 pages full of verbal invention, oblique narration, and a scattered, nonlinear, chronology. In this comprehensively revised second edition, Burn maps Wallace's influence on contemporary American fiction, outlines Wallace's poetics, and provides a full-length study of the novel, drawing out the most important themes and ideas, before surveying Wallace's post-Infinite Jest output, including The Pale King.

Stephen J. Burn

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