Book Review: The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction by Adam S. Miller
Even for those only casually acquainted with the field of Wallace Studies, the sanctimonious title of this slender volume from Adam S. Miller (Collin College, Texas) – part of Bloomsbury’s ‘New Directions in Religion and Literature’ series – might prompt alarm bells. Indeed, whilst the claim on the back cover – that this is ‘the first book to explore key religious themes’ in the work of Wallace – may be technically true, this is not a subject area that will be unfamiliar to Wallace scholars.
Book Review: Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace edited by Philip Coleman
In Adam Kelly’s overview of the critical field surrounding David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), he notes that during the last years of Wallace’s life there was ‘a steady stream of scholarly interest, but more recently that stream has become a torrent’ (46). If we consider the vast amount of blogs, reviews, and think pieces, that have emerged to coincide with the recent U.S. release of the film The End of the Tour – which portrays five days with Wallace on the promotional tour for Infinite Jest (1996) – we can discern that that torrent has become a deluge. Indeed, it may be that we are fast approaching – or have already hurtled past – the point that marks ‘peak Wallace’.
Book Review: American Fiction in Transition: Observer-Hero Narrative, the 1990s, and Postmodernism by Adam Kelly
American Fiction in Transition focuses on four novels from the ‘long 1990s’ – Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000); Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992); Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993); E. L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (1994) – that are emblematic of what Kelly convincingly argues is a significant contemporary literary genre: the observer-hero narrative.
Book Review: The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 by Stefano Ercolino
In this assertive monograph Ercolino seeks to introduce and codify the formal characteristics of what he terms the ‘maximalist novel’: ‘an aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel’ that emerged in the United States with William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) (xi).
Book Review: The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place by Wendy Harding
Coinciding with the summer 2014 issue of Granta entitled ‘American Wild’, and the news in October that the term ‘anthropocene’ might soon be officially adopted as the name of our epoch, the publication of Harding’s monograph could not be more prescient.
Conference Review: ‘Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace’
‘Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace’ Held at Birkbeck, University of London 7 February 2015 A building as twistingly complex as some of Wallace’s sentences provided the venue for Birkbeck, University of London’s ‘Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace’, an important event in the field of Wallace Studies. The first wave of Wallace scholarship had a vested interest in eulogizing Wallace in order to justify the study of him. Now that his place in the canon seems reasonably assured, there is an opportunity for scholars to conduct more critical and probing analysis, a development that was evident in many of the papers. Appropriately enough, the first panel dealt with aspects of Wallace’s reception and subsequent canonization. Dr. Tony Venezia (Birkbeck/Middlesex University) began by noting that Wallace is unusual, as the first research into his work was undertaken […]
Book Review: Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy edited by Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb
“Allard den Dulk provides by far the most impressive essay in the collection, suggesting a Sartrean model of pre-reflection as an ideal philosophical model for Wallace’s characters, an assertion that goes against the dominant critical consensus that Wallace was a proponent of choice.”
60 Seconds With Iain Williams
If you could time-travel to observe one moment in the history of America, where would you go?
“So many possibilities! I think I’d have to travel back a couple of hundred years and visit Yosemite Valley, without having seen it in photographs first. That would be pretty special. Failing that, Hill Valley in 1955 to see Marty McFly play ‘Johnny B. Goode’ for the first time.”
Review of American Imperialism and Identity Conference
American Imperialism and National Identity Conference, University of Durham 14 June 2014 With Iraq in turmoil and U.S. military involvement in the Middle East once again in the spotlight, the timing of the ‘American Imperialism and National Identity Conference’ on the 14th of June at St. Aidan’s College, University of Durham, could not have been more prescient. This interdisciplinary conference for postgraduates and early career researchers appropriately brought together an international array of academics to present their research on a wide variety of topics pertaining to U.S. imperialism. The conference was opened with a whirlwind welcome by Philip Gannon (Durham University). Perhaps this was a little too brief, as a more detailed introduction would have counteracted the disparate nature of the conference, and established a focal point for discussion to return to. The first panel of the day – ‘9/11 and U.S. Imperialism’ – was kicked off by Dr. Flavio Sanza […]