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Home News by Category Critical Analysis Death is Not the End: David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and his Critics

Death is Not the End: David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and his Critics

Jonny Thakkar, co-editor of the new twice-yearly journal, The Point, has let me know that an outstanding piece of DFW critical analysis has been published in their latest issue. Jon Baskin's Death is Not the End: David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and his Critics is worth every second of your time.
In a nut-shell, it is a close look at the ways in which many critics have misunderstood the nature of DFW's work. We have all read reviews that suggest DFW is 'style over substance'. The same reviews never take the time to consider how the style and stucture might work to contribute to the emotional substance of his work. This article addresses the crtitics issue, and also considers the influence of Wittgenstein to DFW's body of work.
It is a very quotable article. Here's just one part that resonates with my current re-reading Infinite Jest:
Jest challenges its readers most directly not with endnotes, long paragraphs, or obscure references to post-structuralist critics (we were ready for all those things), but by validating a life-approach that cuts against everything we’ve learned is worthy of our attention. Many people in America already knew that AA worked; Wallace, however, was the first to propose it as a solution to the problem of postmodern thinking. This problem had the structure of addiction, he suggested. That was why it took a sophisticated, difficult novel like Infinite Jest to make the people who tend to read sophisticated, difficult novels think hard about things that were meaningful and true.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 April 2012 00:14  

The Howling Fantods