Great article by Jennifer Howard over at The Chronicle of Higher Education titled The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace. It's a look at the development of critical work about David Foster Wallace:
Readers outside academe caught on to Wallace before scholars did. When he died, academic interest in him had only begun to show real signs of life, with scholars starting to look closely at the ways in which Wallace responded to and reshaped for a new generation the postmodernism practiced by writers like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Two years later, spurred in part by his death but even more by a rising generation of young scholars, the impending publication of a posthumous novel, and the opening of a major archive of the writer's papers, David Foster Wallace studies is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise.
The article is filled with some of the exciting projects being worked on by scholars such as:
- Marshall Boswell (Understanding David Foster Wallace) and Stephen Burn (David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide ) are presently coediting a collection of scholarly articles about David Foster Wallace.
- Stephen Burn has edited a collection of interviews with Wallace, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi, and he is editing a volume of Wallace's letters in collaboration with the writer's estate.
- The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, is scheduled for publication by the University of Iowa Press and is likely to appear in 2012. It will combine a broad range of critical essays with thoughts on Wallace by other creative writers, including his friend Don DeLillo and his sometime rival Jonathan Franzen. Samuel Cohen, an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Lee Konstantinou, a postdoctoral fellow in Stanford University's Program in Writing and Rhetoric, are the volume's co-editors.
[via @JenHoward and @AlexanderKafka]
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