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Great new piece about DFW and authorship by Mike Miley over at Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, Desperately Seeking David: Authorship in the Early Works of David Foster Wallace:
"However, several stories in Girl not commonly discussed in Wallace scholarship experiment with another, more present and intimate mode of authorship. Stories such as “Lyndon” and “Here and There” gesture toward the necessity of clear and distinct boundaries between author and influence, author and text, author and character, author and reader. Rather than seeking to dissolve borders, as his authorial pose can at times appear to endorse, the authorial mode Wallace arrives at in Girl preserves these borders. What must change is the stance of the author to their role. Instead of approaching the reader as a kind of conquest to be overpowered or absorbed into the author, the author must regard the reader as another subject eager to engage in dialogue with another, equally present and engaged, human being, however imperfect or impossible such a dialogue may be. By the end of these works, Wallace advocates for an authorial presence that rejects gimmicky authorial masks and dead authors and instead develops an author figure whose persona is convex, reaching outward toward the reader in hope of colliding with them rather than absorbing them."
Read it in full here.
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