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David Foster Wallace News and Resources Since March 97

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Home News by Category The Pale King Two Pale King Pieces by Robert Banagan

Two Pale King Pieces by Robert Banagan

Robert Banagan, Research Fellow (and friend of mine) in the Faculty of Higher Education at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia has two separate Pale King related appearances in the media today.

The first is his piece about David Foster Wallace for the Wheeler Centre in the lead up to their event next week (at which I'll be speaking), The Truth’s No Stranger Than Fiction:

While his work is wildly entertaining, Wallace wrote with deep concern about how ‘reality’ was manipulated by forces driven by an agenda. His aim wasn’t just to provoke but to empower readers to reflect on modernity’s ethical consequences – on what the effects of television might be, for instance. Although his wondrous mind straddled mathematics, modal logic, philosophy, creative writing and literary journalism, Wallace’s ethical compass never wavered. He once proclaimed that his was “a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values, and it’s our job to make them up.” And Wallace paid dearly for his heroic efforts to do just that. In his posthumous novel, The Pale King, Wallace suggests the ability to tolerate (and transcend) tedium and boredom are absolutely essential for a person to feel fully human.

The second was an appearance on ABC Radio National's The Book Show, which you can listen to here: The Pale King: posthumous novel from David Foster Wallace.

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