David Foster Wallace's recent death shocked critics and readers alike; since 1987, Foster Wallace had been producing some of the most avant-garde and challenging prose in American fiction. For class, we'll be looking at his non-fiction in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, as well as a few of his short stories from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Foster Wallace is most renowned, however, for his 1079 page magnum opus, Infinite Jest, which was published in 1996. In Infinite Jest and in his earlier novel, The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace pushed at the boundaries of the genre of fiction and challenged readers by introducing them to extended footnotes that threatened to take over the stories he was telling and lengthy, punctuationless sentences that carried the reader into Foster Wallace's own unique system of mental processes and associations.Foster Wallace's presence in American fiction will be sorely missed. Time magazine named Infinite Jest one of its "All Time 100 Greatest Novels" and critic David Ulin called him "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years." Foster Wallace was also known as a kind and generous teacher, who taught creative writing and English classes at Pomona College in California for a number of years prior to his death.
Posts
1 comment:
While reading Wallace I can't help wondering if the fact that Wallace is dead intensifies the impact his writing has on new readers. Similarly to the idea of the "reclusive writer image" that Delillo presents in Mao II. He seems fully engaged in his writing and excited about the claims he's making. Its incredibly sad that Wallace's fervent passion is no longer creating, morbid I know!
Post a Comment