Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature

289 Pages·2016·2.408 MB·English

by  Lucas Thompson

David Foster Wallace Studies
Vol. 1
Series Editor
Stephen J. Burn, University of Glasgow, UK
Advisory Board
Kasia Boddy, University of Cambridge, UK
Marshall Boswell, Rhodes College, USA
Paul Giles, University of Sydney, Australia
Charles B. Harris, Illinois State University, USA
Luc Herman, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Steven Moore, Independent Scholar, USA
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Global Wallace

David Foster Wallace and World Literature
Lucas Th ompson
Bloomsbury Academicy
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
NEW YORK • LONDON • OXFORD • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
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Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury
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First published 2017
© Lucas Thompson, 2017
Series Editor’s Introduction © Stephen J. Burn, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-Publication Data
Names: Thompson, Lucas, author.
Title: Global Wallace : David Foster Wallace and world literature /
Lucas Thompson.
Other titles: David Foster Wallace and world literature
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Series: David Foster
Wallace studies ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016020576 (print) | LCCN 2016037003 (ebook)
| ISBN 9781501320668 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501320675 (ePub)
| ISBN 9781501320682 (ePDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Wallace, David Foster--Criticism and interpretation. |
American literature–Foreign infl uences. | Internationalism in literature.
| Literature and society--United States--History--20th century. | American
fi ction--20th century--History and criticism. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM/
General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General.
Classifi cation: LCC PS3573.A425635 Z88 2016 (print) |
LCC PS3573.A425635 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020576
ISBN : HB : 978-1-5013-2066-8
ePub: 978-1-5013-2067-5
e PDF : 978-1-5013-2068-2
Series: David Foster Wallace Studies
Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray
Cover image © Creative Commons
Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in the United States of America
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for Catherine
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Contents
Series Editor’s Introduction ix
Introduction. Wallace and the World 1
“Territorial reconfi gurations”: Wallace and world literary space 19
1 Wallace and World Literature 25
A genealogy of world literature 25
Resisting Bloom’s “I nfl uenza” : Infl uence and intertextuality 36
An Emersonian pragmatist: Wallace’s global quotations 46
2 Wallace and Latin America 51
“Th e wacko Latins”: Manuel Puig and the lure of Latin-
American experimentalists 51
Depoliticizing Manuel Puig and Jamaica Kincaid 59
Code- scrambling Borges 71
Programming literary infl uence 85
3 Wallace and Russia 89
Wallace’s Dostoevsky obsession 93
Retelling Th e Death of Ivan Ilyich in “Good Old Neon” 106
Holographic infl uence 111
4 Wallace and Eastern Europe: Kafk a and Others 117
High art precedents: Wallace and the European literary
tradition 117
Posthumanizing Kafk a 126
Wallace’s Kafk aesque comic sensibility 142
A literary “touchstone”: Transposing Kafk a 155
5 French Existentialism’s Aft erlives: Wallace and the Fiction of
the US South 161
“Ooohhh, the big, sexy like philosophical term”: Wallace and
French existentialism 161
Walker Percy and “ontological insecurity” 170
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viii Contents
Flannery O’Connor’s “bloody grace” 180
Americanizing existentialism 190
6 African-American Appropriations: Race, Hip-Hop, and Popular
Anthropology 197
Th e “erasure of diff erence”: Wallace and race 197
“Another Pioneer” and popular anthropology 205
Ms. Chahla Neti-Neti and Joseph Campbell 216
Signifying Rappers : Wallace’s racial ethnography 220
Wallace as intertextual “sampler” 232
Conclusion. “It’s a Small Continent Aft er All”? Wallace and
the World 237
Acknowledgments 245
Bibliography 247
Index 265
Series Editor’s Introduction
Lucas Th ompson’s Global Wallace is the fi rst volume in Bloomsbury’s new
series, David Foster Wallace Studies. Th e series is driven by the belief that the
exponential growth in interest in Wallace’s work during recent years
necessitates a corresponding evolution in the way we think about Wallace’s
writing. It is no longer necessary to make a case for Wallace’s worthiness as a
subject of scholarly attention when, as Jonathan Franzen notes, “a literary
establishment that had never so much as short- listed one of his books for a
national prize [has] now united to declare him a lost national treasure.” 1 Nor,
as books and essays on Wallace proliferate, is it necessary to off er a book- by-
book appraisal of a body of work that has already received its preliminary
surveys, and whose abiding obsessions and contours are largely clear. What is
now needed is work that has absorbed the lessons of earlier scholarship and
is ready to move Wallace criticism into new areas, rather than, as N. Katherine
Hayles writes of Mark Taylor, acting as if the critic were “Robinson Crusoe,
surveying a trackless beach, when in fact there are critical footprints
everywhere.” 2 Th is series attempts to facilitate that movement by publishing
volumes that fi nd a way to alter the horizons of Wallace scholarship. Th e
focus of some of these volumes will be Wallace- intensive, taking as their goal
the need to develop new perspectives on the now extant body of Wallace’s
work; others will respond to the particularly urgent need to see Wallace in
context, putting his work back into its vibrant literary, social, and cultural
context. Whether re- formulating the axioms of Wallace criticism, bringing
his work into dialogue with unexplored theoretical models, or remapping the
coordinates that govern our understanding of contemporary fi ction, the
series will emphasize work that does not re- invent the wheel, but builds on
earlier scholarship in an eff ort to genuinely advance Wallace studies.
Wallace criticism really begins in the early 1990s, though with few
exceptions, 3 his signifi cance for academics at this time hinged almost entirely
1 Jonathan Franzen , Farther Away ( New York : Farrar , Straus, and Giroux 2012 ), 38 .
2 N. Katherine Hayles , “Rewiring Literary Criticism,” review of R ewiring the Real , by Mark
C. Taylor , Los Angeles Review of Books , June 15, 2013 , accessed April 21, 2016 . Online
access: https://lareviewofb ooks.org/article/rewiring- literary-criticism/ .
3 Some notable examples would include a group of short essays, in an A NQ issue devoted
to “Th e Future of American Fiction,” which singled Wallace out as “a young writer worth
watching”; earlier still, Neil D. Isaacs devoted a page to discussing “the fi gure of the stand-
up comedian” in Broom . See, Steven Moore , “ Fin de Siecle ,” ANQ 5 ( 1992 ): 224 ; and Neil
D. Isaacs, “ Fiction Night at the Comedy Club ,” New England Review and Bread Loaf
Quarterly 11 ( 1989 ): 309 .
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