Research Catalog

Title

Global Wallace : David Foster Wallace and world literature / Lucas Thompson.

Author

Thompson, Lucas

Publication

• New York : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2017.
• ©2017

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xiii, 271 pages; 23 cm

Summary

• "David Foster Wallace is invariably seen as an emphatically American figure. Lucas Thompson challenges this consensus, arguing that Wallace's investments in various international literary traditions are central to both his artistic practice and his critique of US culture. Thompson shows how, time and again, Wallace's fiction draws on a diverse range of global texts, appropriating various forms of world literature in the attempt to craft fiction that critiques US culture from oblique and unexpected vantage points. Using a wide range of comparative case studies, and drawing on extensive archival research, Global Wallace reveals David Foster Wallace's substantial debts to such unexpected figures as Jamaica Kincaid, Julio Cortázar, Jean Rhys, Octavio Paz, Leo Tolstoy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Albert Camus, among many others. It also offers a more comprehensive account of the key influences that Wallace scholars have already perceived, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Manuel Puig. By reassessing Wallace's body of work in relation to five broadly construed geographic territories -- Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Africa -- the book reveals the mechanisms with which Wallace played particular literary traditions off one another, showing how he appropriated vastly different global texts within his own fiction. By expanding the geographic coordinates of Wallace's work in this way, Global Wallace reconceptualizes contemporary American fiction, as being embedded within a global exchange of texts and ideas"--
• "Graduate students and scholars studying contemporary American fiction, David Foster Wallace, and world and comparative literature"--

Series Statement

David Foster Wallace studies ; Vol. 1

Uniform Title

David Foster Wallace studies ; v. 1.

Alternative Title

David Foster Wallace and world literature

Subject

• Wallace, David Foster > Criticism and interpretation
• American literature > Foreign influences
• Internationalism in literature
• Literature and society > United States > History > 20th century
• American fiction > 20th century > History and criticism

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-263) and index.

Contents

Wallace and the World -- Wallace and World Literature -- Wallace and Latin America -- Wallace and Russia -- Wallace and Eastern Europe: Kafka and Others -- French Existentialism's Afterlives: Wallace and the Fiction of the US South -- African-American Appropriations: Race, Hip-Hop, and Popular Anthropology -- Conclusion. "It's a Small Continent After All"? Wallace and the World.

Call Number

JFD 17-810

ISBN

• 9781501320668
• 1501320661

LCCN

2016020576

OCLC

966929510

Author

Thompson, Lucas, author.

Title

Global Wallace : David Foster Wallace and world literature / Lucas Thompson.

Publisher

New York : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2017.

Copyright Date

©2017

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

David Foster Wallace studies ; Vol. 1

David Foster Wallace studies ; v. 1.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-263) and index.

Other Form:

Online version: Thompson, Lucas, author. Global Wallace New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016 9781501320675

Research Call Number

JFD 17-810