Looks like there is going to be a Wallace panel at the 2012 ACLA annual meeting, March 29-April 1, 2012, at Brown University in Providence and they're looking for more presenters/papers:
D.F. Wallace’s controversial impact on a generation of American writers has roots in a sense of cultural crisis which Wallace described, in a Village Voice review of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky’s biography, as our “pass[ing] through our nihilist phase.” Wallace’s Infinite Jest, his Interviews with Hideous Men, and his satiric Consider the Lobster exemplify a self-diagnostic literary style that Wallace has [self] critiqued as some “trick of intertextual quotation or incongruous intertextual quotation…sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization flourish” that keeps “our art from deep convictions or desperate questions.” The questions this seminar might provoke include: Which contemporary writers can be considered Wallace’s heirs? To what degree has Grand Theory, particularly deconstruction, molded their and Wallace’s style and world view? Which models of “deep conviction” such as or besides Dostoevsky’s, could be considered Wallace’s literary influences or provocations? What connections might we make between contemporary literatures of addiction, commodity fetishism, and self-laceration and what Jacques Derrida described, in Of Grammatology, as the erasure or ambiguation of “the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism” ?
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