Selected Topics in 20th Century and Cont. Literature: David Foster Wallace

Catalog description

David Foster Wallace holds an outsized place in contemporary literature. Due to his status as perhaps one of the last American writers to provocatively be deemed “genius,” critics are still poring over and sifting through Wallace’s “difficult gifts,” as Zadie Smith called them. The course will primarily consist of working our way through Infinite Jest. We will analyze its structural facets (Wallace’s editor once described its organization as like a “piece of glass… dropped from a great height”), its theoretical concerns (e.g. tennis, continental philosophy, avant-garde film, addiction, depression), and what its dystopian fascinations say about the social and political landscape of our present.