We can approach the books from a variety of different critical, theoretical, and ideological perspectives, too, depending on students’ backgrounds and interests. In essence, we can talk about whatever you wish to — provided that we do it cogently and well. Salon has an excerpt from the newly issued David Foster Wallace Reader, the entire syllabus […]
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Timothy Leo Taranto illustrates some of literature’s greats, including David Foster Wallace and Gromit, Flan-nery O’Connor, and John Frankensteinbeck.
...moreNYT Magazine asked writers and critics which novels deserved this year’s “lost” Pultizer Prize. DFW’s The Pale King was a repeat hypothetical winner. “The Pale King, my favorite work of fiction from 2011, isn’t David Foster Wallace’s greatest novel; perhaps it isn’t even fully ‘his,’ given that it was edited and published after his death. […]
...moreRumpus contributor Daniel Roberts has two pieces on David Foster Wallace in honor of what would have been his 50th birthday. This Berfois essay examines The Marriage Plot‘s Leonard Bankhead character as a representation of DFW. And, at Salon, Roberts asks us to consider Wallace’s journalism. “Whether or not Wallace fully believed in the shtick […]
...moreDavid Foster Wallace’s “secret life as a philosopher” and the story of how Fate, Time, and Language, his honors theses turned postmortem book, came to be published.
...moreThe June issue of the Atlantic has a look at the mind-blowing “Oasis of the Seas,” a gargantuan ocean liner forthcoming from cruise company Royal Caribbean International. Its unprecedented scale of apparent luxury surely required feats of engineering. But any awe that inspires would seem to wash away with apprehension of the massive ship’s untold […]
...moreYou know, you come home from, say, a happening launch party, it’s around midnight and you’re feeling excellent, you turn on the TV so as not to consume your prophylactic course of pretzels and water in anomic silence, and see that channel 44 is about three minutes into its late nite movie, Good Will Hunting, […]
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